This is really the story of how we got into wargaming and some reminiscences of those times! Mostly text.
The Classic Garden Wargaming Period Begins
Allies Versus Allies - the only pictures available for this section
Peter and I had been good friends since Kindergarten. When we were in grade three, he went off to England for a year with his family (his Dad had sabbatical, in Oxford, IIRC). We had both been making models since Kindergarten. When he came back in grade 4, he had a bunch of fascinating Airfix "little soldiers" as well as some models (up until recently, I actually had in my possession the Airfix German half track he had put together in while overseas, but, tragically, someone accidentally threw it away). We used to play games in his basement with a river made of laying down some old series of books with green-blue coloured covers. The river was the boundary which divided our territories; one of us would have his Airfix 1/32 scale figures, the other would have the little soldiers. Buildings of Lego abounded. A couple of years later, we played some very simple games with rules in his back yard; Foreign Legion versus Arabs, using guns from Royal Horse Artillery sets. Troops could move one length of a little tray (from those boxes full of trays for storing nuts and bolts and things) and shoot two trays. Whatever you shot at was killed. Great fun. Later, we collected some Fujimi, Airfix & EDAI (these were snap togethers) models that were available in some of the stores.
The Classic Garden Wargaming Period Begins
As time went by, we concentrated more on modelling (the Bandai 1/48 stuff and later, Tamiya 1/35). My smaller scale stuff did not go to waste however and contributed heroically to the bloody Ant Wars in my back yard. One summer, Pete and I played a fair sized game on the side of my parents' home. I have no idea what rules we used, but it was not the bang bang you're dead sort of thing. That same summer (we were between grades 7 and 8) we both went to scout camp and Dave, who had been in the same elementary school class as us from Kindergarten to grade 6 was there. We somehow got into the subject of wargames and Dave espoused the military genius of Chris, one of his neighbours. In our spare time, we three wrote a set of wargame rules which was incredibly simple compared to now (see Wargame Rules We Use - you'll have to use your browser's "Back" key to return here).
The first game was on the side of my parents' house, as were many of the games to follow. We divided what forces Pete and I had up into two teams (with no historical basis). We both dug in. This was one of the fun features of our "garden gaming". You could dig bunkers and trenches, line them with twigs and such and they looked good. Anyway, Pete and I, offensively minded, left a very small force in our base and charged forward. Chris and Dave, thinking it a good plan to retreat a large number of their forces across the back yard (I guess they were attempting "defense in depth") left only half their forces behind. Pete and I had a good time of slaughtering all their troops and equipment and then chased the remainder across the yard. The game came to a close when Dave had to mysteriously go home for a bath. This was how many games ended.
Rules were re-written for each of the many games we played that Summer. As time progressed, they became more and more complicated. Also Chris and Dave ended up losing more than half of the 400 Airfix troops with which I started the Summer. I know this, because in organizing my forces for the Ant Wars, I kept careful track of how many men I had - over 400. By that Summer's end, I realised I only had left a little more than 200. Not all disappeared; some mysteriously some how showed up at Dave's house a year or two later. Nevertheless, for a few years, until Mom had that part of the yard re-sodded, every now and then one or a few soldiers would show up in the grass.
We also played that hidden tanks, guns, men remained hidden, even when they opened fire. The only way to find these hidden, dug in enemy was to fire speculatively at lumps of ground - the firing player would dig around the target area with his hands to his heart's content until he found something or gave up. This lead to some interesting situations:
That winter, wargaming season over, we talked of an "Allies versus Allies" game in which all of mine and Pete's forces would be pitted against what Chris and Dave had. Thus began the first great arms race. We built up our forces, ordering them from Hobby House in Ottawa and garnering what we could in the local department stores. Meanwhile, we played the odd game the following Summer, including a Napoleonics game (Rule 1 - "All men must be in formation"). We started with some finely painted troops (we never painted most of our troops - probably because the plastic and garden dirt meant little paint would stay on). Pete's cavalry (we were British) charged forward. Dave fired a round from his French cannon...the cavalry were out of range, but Dave wanted to fire at extreme range and let the burst area get some of Pete's crowded cavalry. This caused an argument and the game never finished.
A couple of months later, in Pete's backyard, the Allies versus Allies game took place...
Allies versus Allies - Summer 1977 (Pictures taken with some old camera, out doors)
After that game began our campaign games. The way we determined what forces each side had was by the actual
number of models and figures we had!. We figured we would fight a very hypothetical third world war, so we divided a map of the world
up and each took a country or a number of countries. Pete, Fred and I were one alliance and
Chris and Dave were another. Our forces, ie, the actual models and figures, were organized into map units we called
"divisions", usually about 50 men or so and up to about ten tanks - we didn't really
know much about orders of battle. 
And... we were not too worried about
historical or current accuracy, either; our divisions had everything from the Airfix WWI Mark I to Panzer IVs and Shermans to Leopards and Chieftains! We played one or two games
and I recall one of my "divisions" consisting of infantry supported by the afore mentioned Airfix Mark I, complete with steering trailer, advancing
through a heavily wooded (tons of lichen) ping pong table at my parents' against 8 Chieftains. I don't remember what happened, though maybe the tons of Airfix
kneeling Soviet riflemen whose rifles I cut off and replaced with a glued on
matchstick (to represent a bazooka) helped me....
As far as identification goes, for some reason I can't quite recall, I decided that my national colour would be Humbrol Authentics Gun Metal.
I guess it looked cool to me... Some of my tanks had my national insignia, and one of my Matildas still sports it, which I based on
the Bordurian national symbol I saw on a tank in the TinTin adventure, The Calculus Affair; a solid white circle with a red outline and in the middle of the
circle was something that looked like a simplified mustache. My figures, which we mostly did not paint, were sprayed with gold spray paint to distinguish mine
from Dave's and others' figures. I know that all this must sound absolutely barbaric to most miniature wargamers, but hey, we were in junior high
school. 
As I've already said, our forces were based on our actual individual inventories (I had so many models, that I even pressed two friends, who were not normally into models and who were not into our wargames, into helping me make the bunch of Matchbox Hanomags I had!). We also wrote our own rules, and in this case, we left the rules writing to Pete and Fred. Thus began a year of rules writing, rigging rules for "secret weapons" (Swingfire missiles, F-18s suddenly became the strongest aircraft when Pete and Fred got a couple of aircraft carriers with these aircraft). Intrigue, threatening notes in class between Pete and I when I changed alliances and joinded Chris and Dave. Before that alliance change, Pete had the plans to convert Leopard I into the Leopard II. When I changed sides, he would not give them to me. So Dave and I knocked on Pete's door one day when we knew he was out and told his mother Peter had something for us in his bedroom he wanted us to have. We searched high and low and never found anything, damn it! Dave and I did the same thing, years later in the 90s, when we went to his mother's house to visit her - we ran upstairs to steal some of Pete's homemade wine while he was researching in Ireland.
An extremely intense arms race began - remember each country's forces was based on actual inventory. It lead to a lot of cloak and dagger, such as the "Leopard II" affair already described. I had a paper route and poured money into models. I already had a very large collection compared to the other guys, in the first place. It really got out of control and divided us along alliance lines. We eventually met at my place and had a "TALT" - tactical arms limitation treaty we all discussed and signed. The signed TALT agreement meant that each alliance was restricted to:
The Summer of 1978 we played a few games in the Scoria-UPF campaign. Much of it was minor sea battles against neutrals, but there was a large sea battle in my basement and also an agreement to have my Bismarck meet and fight their Hood. However, when I showed up in Chris's backyard for that one, I had with me a Yammato and two squadrons of torpedo bombers. They didn't trust me after that...There were one or two decent land games too. Pete and Dave also played a small jungle warfare campaign in which Jonathan R participated. It featured secret movement orders which were put in a locked box and then revealed to determine where battles would take place. We also played a number of Free Kreigspiels based at Fred's house with generals at other places communicating by telephone or by bike.
Later that Summer, Jonathan bought a basic D&D set after hearing about it from RonK. we played a game in late August and our imaginations were captured here...we largely left wargaming and played D&D for years. Pete and I left for university and my D&D and wargaming days ended for 7 seven years.
