Phil Barker
| Phil Barker | |
|---|---|
| Born | Philip C. Barker November 5, 1932 Paignton, Devon |
| Occupation | Writer & game designer |
| Nationality | British |
| Subject | Military History,Wargaming |
| Website | |
| www |
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Phil Barker (born 5 November 1932) is one of the major figures in the development of the modern hobby of tabletop wargaming, particularly that of ancient warfare, and is a co-founder of the Wargames Research Group.
In the 1960s he was a methods engineer at British Leyland. However, in the 1970s he took voluntary redundancy to become the first person in the UK to work full-time on wargames writing and rules design. At the time, he was also a keen horseman, a skill which he used to advantage in carrying out experiments in the use of cavalry weapons.
Barker began wargaming as a boy using H.G. Wells Little Wars, though his interest lapsed during his time serving in the army. In the early 1960s he gamed alongside founders of the modern hobby such as Donald Featherstone, Tony Bath, and Charles Grant. At the beginning he did not play ancients. His introduction to ancients was at a wargames show to which he had come to put on a modern warfare demonstration. There he met Tony Bath, and from him he acquired his first ancient wargames figures, an army of Byzantine flats. By 1968 he had written several sets of wargames rules - for ancient and medieval warfare, the American Civil War, the Second World War, and 1966-period wargames., He then began to focus on warfare of antiquity and, in 1968, and, along with Bob O'Brien and Ed Smith, founded the Wargames Research Group. One of the basic principles of the WRG was that wargames rules should be based on the study of the nature of warfare of the period being modelled, and Phil was initially the researcher of the group. He published his best-known work, the Armies and Enemies of Imperial Rome, in 1972.
Barker's major contribution, however, has been as an innovative writer of games mechanisms. He has described his rules-writing philosophy as simply "It is my aim to produce the most accurate and playable rules I possibly can". However, his succinct writing style has drawn criticism, resulting in the term Barkerese to describe his complex explanation of rules.
The first edition of the WRG's War Games Rules 1000 BC to 500 AD was published in 1969 and immediately made a great impact. Charles Grant later wrote
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