Publishers’ description: This practitioner's guide to solo wargaming offers comprehensive coverage of the subject, showing how it can be a fascinating complement to social gaming or an entire hobby in its own right. This book integrates ideas from across the hobby to discuss various aspects of gaming alone across all manner of conflicts, whether land, sea or air and in any historical period or imagined setting.

Starting with the fundamental question of why people play solo wargames, David Heading lays out the various advantages and disadvantages. He also considers such questions as whether to ‘play both sides’ or to command one army against an ‘automatic’ opponent, giving various ideas on how to control or programme the responses of the opposing force with dice, cards or by other means. There is advice on how to construct challenging and interesting scenarios for one-off engagements, whether these are skirmishes or major battles, historical events or more generic ones, and how to combine these tactical actions into wider campaigns, involving grand strategy, logistics and other factors. Tips on sustaining interest through such activities as recording results, writing campaign diaries and online blogs will help you enrich your hobby. The author has been playing solo wargames for forty years and shares the secrets of happy solo gaming. Packed full of common-sense advice and inspiration, it offers plenty of value to the beginner and the seasoned veteran alike.

Contents:

• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface

1. Why Solo Wargame
   1. Why Wargame Alone?
   2. The advantages and Disadvantages of Solo Wargaming
   3. Sources of Solo inspiration
   4. Wargaming as Narrative
   5. Guidelines for Solo Wargaming
   6. On Dice and Cards
   7. The Rest of the Book
2. Battles
   1. Setting up a Battle
   2. Types of Battles
   3. Wargame Types
   4. Determining Terrain
   5. Choosing the Forces
   6. Generalship
   7. Bias
3. Campaigns
   1. Choosing your Campaign
   2. Choosing a Period
   3. Campaign Scale
   4. Setting Up a Campaign
   5. Campaigns in a Day
   6. Fully Mapped Campaigns
   7. Imagi-nations
   8. Map Moves
   9. Hidden Movement
   10. Reconnaissance
   11. Information Flow and Communications
   12. From Map to Tabletop and Back
   13. Journals and Campaign Diaries
   14. Blogs and Newsletters
   15. Mixing Scales and Sizes
4. Personalities, Logisticsd and Randomization
   1. Personalities
   2. Unit Histories
   3. Logistics
   4. Recruiting and Finance
   5. Diplomacy
   6. Randomization
5. Siege, Naval and Air Wargames
   1. Siege Wargames
   2. Naval Wargames
   3. Air Wargames
   4. Air, Land and Sea Operations
6. Advancing
   1. Sources of Inspiration
   2. Matters of Taste and Realism
   3. Moving On
   4. And Finally…

• References

Reviewer’s Comments

So, first up and what I’m sure is no surprise but I build models. I do a little solo war board-gaming on the side and when this book review opportunity presented itself for a review, I grabbed it up. Neither good nor bad but I was surprised to see the book was geared to the traditional Miniatures gaming environment. Well, in hindsight, that was pretty darned obvious and in full disclosure I have literally have no back-ground in either building miniatures or gaming with them. So, let’s get started.

The author, Mr. David Heading has quite the list of gaming related articles as well as runs a blog on miniatures gaming. I found this book to be very well written and despite not being a miniature gaming person, it was not at all disappointed with the read. My impression of the book was that it isn’t necessarily geared to first time players but rather to those with at least some familiarity with miniatures gaming and are looking to adapt their play towards solo play whatever the reason. Given the wide range of game types, rules, scopes, and a host of other factors impacting how the games are played, Mr. Heading addresses mostly generalities on how to adapt existing gameplay to the solo environment. He also covers how to keep your focus on gaming, adjusting the game scale to suit solo play and more importantly on keeping solo gaming interesting. Oddly, his approach to making these rules adjustments is what I found to be the most enlightening. As a board-gamer, typically the solo rules are provided by the game’s designer and typically doesn’t present a challenge to the player.

In summary, for those of you who have an interesting in miniature gaming you should find this book to be a good read for a person who doesn’t miniature game, I really enjoyed my time invested in the book.

Note: The book is also available in electronic print for $16.99 through your favorite digital reseller.

I would like to thank Casemate Publishing, as well as The Pen and Sword for providing this book to the IPMS USA for review.

Recommended!