GUNFIGHTING, PART ONE

I have mentioned before the skirmish wargames of Mike Blake, Ian Colwill and Steve Curtis as important ancestors of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Their emergent role-playing properties have also been highlighted by Jon Peterson in his book The Elusive Shift and on his blog.¹ Yet the history of these fascinating games has not been fully explored, and their influence on the development of role-playing games remains in my opinion underestimated.

In an effort to rectify this at least partially, I have investigated them further. John Curry, of the History of Wargaming Project, kindly put me in touch with Blake and Colwill, who have been exceptionally generous with their time, answering a great number of questions and sharing with me several important documents, some hitherto unpublished. I am extremely grateful for their help.²

The results of the research are documented in this series of posts. This, the first, post gives an account of the creation and early history of these games; the second considers their role-playing characteristics; and the third analyses their possible influence on Dungeons & Dragons.

THE ROAD TO PIMA COUNTY

Accounts of the beginning of these games have been remarkably consistent since shortly after the events took place. Blake, Colwill and Curtis were friends who met regularly to play wargames together in Bristol and were members of the Bristol Wargames Society. Curtis was also, by his own admission, “a Western nut”. On one occasion when Colwill and Curtis met to play an ancients wargame, their conversation turned to the film The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966), which Colwill had just seen. The question was posed as to how gunfights like that film’s climactic three-way shootout might be simulated in a wargame, and from the discussion emerged a desire on Curtis’ part to recreate the gunfight at the OK Corral on the tabletop.

54mm scale figures and buildings were bought and, if necessary, converted. They included miniatures from Britains, Timpo and Kellogg’s cereal boxes.

No suitable rules were available at the time, so Blake, Colwill and Curtis set to designing some of their own that could handle not only the period of the Old West, but also a game that focused on a small number of characters in an extremely compressed time period. They conducted what was essentially “a time-and-motion study” of Western gunfights. Colwill was called upon to perform various actions while being timed, so as to determine what might be possible in two-and-a-half seconds. Rules were devised largely de novo, though some ideas were taken from the Wargames Research Group’s Ancient War Games Rules (1969). It is striking how few antecedents there were for this experiment. The gunfight rules came largely out of the blue.

Mike Blake, Ian Colwill and Steve Curtis³

The precise date of the initial OK Corral game is not recorded, but can be approximated by collating a number of sources. The earliest mention of these gunfight games was in July 1969, when Donald Featherstone reviewed the third issue of the Bristol Wargames Society Journal with “details of wargames representing Western gunfights”.⁴ This date provides a firm terminus ante quem. It is, however, possible that the games mentioned in this source took place some time earlier. The BWS Journal was a bimonthly publication and there were frequently delays of a few months between the publication of magazines and their review by Featherstone.⁵ Furthermore, the use of the plural “wargames”, if taken literally, might imply a series of games that had taken place over a period of time.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly went on general release in the UK on 6 September 1968. This provides a terminus a quo, if Colwill’s recollection of the film he discussed with Curtis is correct. The publication of the Wargames Research Group’s Ancient War Games Rules in February 1969 may not, however, provide a firm indication of timing. It is not clear whether a form of gunfight rules existed before that date without the elements derived from the WRG rules. Colwill may also have had access to the WRG rules before publication, as he was a participant in the 1969 National Wargames Championships, in which they were used.

On the basis of this information, it seems most likely the development of the gunfight rules and OK Corral game took place in late 1968 or early 1969.

The OK Corral game was intended to be a one-off, but was such a success that Blake, Colwill and Curtis began playing regular games of this kind. They started as discrete scenarios, but soon developed into a campaign with recurring characters. The fictional Pima County in New Mexico Territory was the location for the campaign, and the exploits of the characters “Botch” Blake, “Kid” Colwill and “Long-Haired” Steve Curtis were recorded as narratives in The Annals of Pima County.

Since Curtis was by profession a printer, a decision was taken to publish the rules that had been developed. The result was the first edition of the Western Gunfight Wargame Rules, which appeared in February 1970.⁶

Western Gunfight Wargame Rules, first edition (1970)

The first edition of the Western Gunfight Wargame Rules was well received. Donald Featherstone called it “probably about the best four shillings’ worth you will obtain anywhere in this day and age”.⁷ The result was “a flood of orders”. By November 1970 Curtis had “nearly exhausted [his] initial printing” and was considering an expanded second edition.⁸

The new edition duly arrived in August 1971.⁹ It contained not only the original gunfighting rules, but also expansions covering native Americans, mountain men, combat with shotguns, bows, arrows and knives and several period conflicts. Featherstone reviewed this edition just as favourably as the first.¹⁰

Western Gunfight Wargame Rules, second edition (1971)

The first two editions of the Western Gunfight Wargame Rules had relied exclusively on the use of six-sided dice. However, in 1969 Mike Philpott, a mathematician and member of the BWS, had designed a set of icosahedral percentage dice.¹¹ They were not the first such dice. Wargamers had, for example, already become aware of the Japanese Standards Association’s percentage dice,¹² but these had not been designed for the purposes of gaming, and were expensive and rare imports. Philpott and other members of the BWS funded the creation by a jeweller of a master mould for the casting of their own versions,¹³ which they put on sale in 1970.¹⁴

Colwill was keen to revise the Western Gunfight Wargame Rules to take advantage of the new dice. The rules were therefore rewritten on this basis, though not yet published. Percentage mechanisms instead made their first skirmish-wargame appearance elsewhere. Curtis had become interested in colonial wargames, and so Blake, Colwill and Curtis adapted the gunfight skirmish rules for that era with the help of Ted Herbert, who possessed extensive knowledge of the period. Colonial Skirmish Wargames (1972) was the outcome.¹⁵

Colonial Skirmish Wargames (1972)

The percentage-based gunfight rules were eventually published in November 1974, as The Old West Skirmish Wargames.¹⁶ This was again a greatly expanded edition. After the early death of Curtis, who suffered from muscular dystrophy, in August 1975,¹⁷ Blake and Colwill continued to produce further skirmish rules with new collaborator Mike Bell: Flintlock & Ramrod (1976), a fourth edition of The Old West (1977) and Twentieth Century (1981). However, by this point the role-playing genie was already out of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax’s bottle.

Part two of this series addresses the question of the extent to which these skirmish games should be considered the first role-playing games.

FOOTNOTES

1 Jon Peterson, The Elusive Shift (2020), pp15-18; idem, ‘Western Gunfight (1970): the First RPG?’, Playing at the World (14 February 2021) [http://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2021/02/western-gunfight-1970-first-rpg.html].

2 Information for which no source is cited derives from my correspondence with Blake and Colwill.

3 Mike Blake, Ian Colwill and Steve Curtis, Western Gunfight Wargame Rules, second edition (1971), back cover.

4 Donald Featherstone, ‘Looking Around’, Wargamer’s Newsletter 88 (July 1969), p23.

5 Donald Featherstone, ‘Looking Around’, Wargamer’s Newsletter 94 (January 1970), p23.

6 Ian Colwill, ‘Individual Wargaming’, Wargamer’s Newsletter 133 (April 1973), pp7-8; Mike Blake and Ian Colwill, ‘Personalities on Parade’, a draft of an unpublished interview with Donald Featherstone at Southern Militaire 1977, in a letter from Donald Featherstone to Mike Blake, dated 21 June 1977; Mike Blake, Ian Colwill and Steve Curtis, The Old West Skirmish Wargames: Wargaming Western Gunfights (2017), pp3, 9-10 & 314.

7 Donald Featherstone, ‘Book Reviews’, Wargamer’s Newsletter 99 (June 1970), pp21 & 15.

8 Steve Curtis, ‘You Write to Us’, Wargamer’s Newsletter 104 (November 1970), p17.

9 Mike Blake, Ian Colwill and Steve Curtis, The Old West Skirmish Wargames: Wargaming Western Gunfights (2017), p3.

10 Donald Featherstone, ‘Western Gunfight Wargame Rules’, Wargamer’s Newsletter 116 (November 1971), p6.

11 Mike Blake, ‘How Would You Like to Be Wyatt Earp… or Flashman… or Sharpe? – A Different Kind of Wargaming’ (undated speech to the Wessex Military History Society); idem, ‘It’s all Steve’s Fault, Really’ (undated speech script).

12 Donald Featherstone, ‘Must List’, Wargamer’s Newsletter 92 (November 1969), p19. For an earlier citation of JSA dice in a western, non-gaming context, see CB Tompkins, ‘Random Number Generating Icosahedral Dice (20-Face Dice) Japanese Standards Association’, review in Mathematics of Computation, volume 15, number 73 (January 1961), pp94-95.

13 Mike Blake, ‘It’s all Steve’s Fault, Really’ (undated speech script).

14 Donald Featherstone, ‘Must List’, Wargamer’s Newsletter 94 (January 1970), p20; idem, ‘Looking Around’, Wargamer’s Newsletter 103 (October 1970), p23.

15 Mike Blake, ‘How Would You Like to Be Wyatt Earp… or Flashman… or Sharpe? – A Different Kind of Wargaming’ (undated speech to the Wessex Military History Society); idem, ‘It’s all Steve’s Fault, Really’ (undated speech script).

16 Mike Blake, Ian Colwill and Steve Curtis, The Old West Skirmish Wargames: Wargaming Western Gunfights (2017), p3.

17 Donald Featherstone, ‘Editorial’, Wargamer’s Newsletter 163 (October 1975), p7.

Title image from Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957). Internal art generated by Bing Image Designer. Used without permission. No challenge intended to the rights holders.