Old-school wargaming is hard to define by its main feature. However, everyone pretty much agrees that Wells, Young, Grant, Featherstone, Morschauser, and Wesencraft were at the heart of it – it's hard to find anything wargames related that one or more of them didn't try.
The originators of wargaming shared a conviction that the whole package – troops, board, and rules – had to serve the pleasure, interests, and resources of each individual wargamer. Think of commercial rules as cookbooks, franchise rules and copyrighted figures as boxed or canned foods, and wargames complete in one box as TV dinners. Those store-bought meals may share ingredients, but they're not home cooking.
“Oldhammer” feels like old school because, like home cooking, it begins by telling some large organization “Thanks, but I prefer it how it used to be,” and by using the ingredients the wargamer has to hand, not buying a whole new set of the latest fad.
So how does one go about wargaming from scratch? As in cooking,
