I first started gaming using a copy of WWII land warfare rules by Charles Grant, published on a monthly basis around 1966/7 in the UK's Meccano Magazine. These early games soon led to sandtable platoon exercises in the school Cadet force, and then on to 'live' exercises with .303 calibre SMLE rifles, Bren guns and thunderflashes. I branched out with gaming in the Napoleonic Wars period and then, throughout the 70's, playing games in the Ancient, Renaissance, Medieval, 19th Century and Modern periods. The local wargames clubs in High Wycombe and in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire often turned out a competition team that took part in many of the UK National Wargames Championships in the late 70's and 80's.

Around 1980 I started playing naval wargames on a regular basis, first with homegrown rules, then with Fletcher Pratt's rules and later Ken Smigelski's Warship Commander rules. Through the first half of 1982 the Falkland's Conflict was rehashed time and again on the club's wargames tables, often in near real time. I remember one evening when we heard about the loss of the Sheffield to an Exocet missile, something we had been gaming only hours earlier. I wrote a lot of programs in BASIC and Pascal running on a TRS-80 to help out with combat calculations for those early games.

In 1985 I was headhunted for a job in Saudi Arabia. and during the next few years rarely managed to get any gaming in. I did run a few turns of a USSR SAG vs US CVBG game by mail before the time lag killed all interest. Back in the UK I restarted gaming, started a BS in Computer Science, and took part in several large scale conflict simulation games at Sandhurst Military College. In 1992 I completed my degree and moved to Bermuda where I got a job with NASA.

At present I work for NASA at the Tracking Station in Bermuda as the Local Area Network Administrator and programmer for the station. I support a network of Mac's, PC's and Unix computers that do all the administrative and support functions here. (And play Harpoon of course).

E-mail --- nclarke@bda-hp.bda.nasa.gov
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