Blast from the Past (4): Tactics II

Back in the early 80s, when I just started into wargaming, it was very hard for a teenager without a significant budget to acquire a lot of board wargames. Belgium wasn't exactly in the centre of wargaming activity at the time, although they were a few shops were you could buy wargames. Availability was one thing, price another.

One of the solutions was to copy wargames. Copying the rulebook was easy in a copyshop (which were plentiful at the time), but counters had to be made, and maps either photocopied and coloured in, or drawn from scratch. I remember making copies of the famous Rise and Decline of the Third Reich, using a lot of cardboard, letraset and coloured paint. Sadly, I threw all these handmade games out when I had enough money to buy all those games myself.

My longtime wargaming friend Eddy S., didn't throw them out so easily, so I was pleasantly surprised when he showed his handmade copy of Tactics II (copied from my original game), dating back to our high school days.

Another interesting fact showed up, as can be seen from the photographs above. For some reason, he always assumed the game had to be played with Red and Blue rotated 90 degrees on the board. This was one of those weird consequences of copying the game, but not having a faithful 100% copy - some labels or indications on the map were forgotten. It never occurred to me one could play Tactics II in this manner (I did play other variants, such as placing the sea borders next to each other for an invasion-style game), but it does look like an interesting variant.