Barry’s demo game of War of the Three Kings at Partizan 2018.
Barry Hilton has been a well-known and respected figure on the show scene for many years, and it was sometime in the early 2000s when I first encountered him staging lavish demo games at shows like Partizan.
Barry took a somewhat different route into the hobby than most wargamers, having abandoned playing with miniature soldiers in his early teens in favour of taking up a career as a rock musician! He eventually returned to his gaming roots in his mid 20s, picked up a copy of a wargames magazine and the rest is, as they say, history.
A regular contributor of magazine articles on a variety of subjects (including to my own Battlegames magazine as many of you will recall), Barry is also the author of several rulesets, most notably Beneath the Lily Banners (War of the Three Kings is its third editon), the Napoleonic ruleset Republic to Empire and skirmish game Donnybrook. He is also the owner of Warfare Miniatures, responsible for lovely 28mm casting suitable for the period 1685-1720.
As you’ll hear, Barry has been a one-man evangelist for that era of history known to many as the Marlburian era, but which in fact encompasses so much more. This early tricorne period is increasingly being shown to have involved the real emerging superpowers of the era such as Sweden, Russia, Holland, Spain and France, a time when Britain was only just beginning to find its feet and of course was undergoing its own Glorious Revolution and adopting a Dutch royal family!
We also discover that Barry has a secret passion for the naval warfare of the era and, considering he’s a dyed-in-the-wool 28mm man, confesses to being another of those of us who were stunned and inspired by Mark Backhouse and Sidney Roundwood’s breathtaking 2mm Siege of Portsmouth game – watch this space!
I really enjoyed chatting with this hobby veteran, and our conversations ranged from some of the decisions he took concerning aspects of his rulesets, his collaboration with American gamer/illustrator/artist/designer Clarence Harrison, thoughts about some controversial aspects of the hobby and how Barry ended up running a wargames figure company when he never planned to do so! I am already thinking that there are probably at least two more podcasts I ought to have with this Scottish superstar of the hobby!
Henry
Barry’s League of Augsburg website (See the shop for rulesets and Warfare Miniatures)
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