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About me, your Gracious Host
My full name is Anthony Edward Richard VII Stapells, born on a sunny day in August in 1966. For the mathematically impaired, that makes me
I'm also married to Sabine Stapells, own a pair of mutts adopted from the RSPCA (combined weight; 140 pounds of fur and saliva), and, most importantly, am a brand new father to Richard Marcus Stapells. The name Marcus, of course, was inspired by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Here's a picture to the right. As you can plainly see, he got my nose.
Unfortunately I'm not independently wealthy, so to make ends meet I work as a pressroom manager at a wholesale printer. I've actually been working in printing (with the occasional foray into other careers) for (Honest! I first got ink under my fingernails at age 10). I'm also Canadian, living about 90 minutes west of Toronto in a town called Kitchener. Historical footnote - it was indeed named after Lord Kitchener. It had been founded by German immigrants who called their town "Berlin". This name created some, ahh, bad feelings in the British Empire during WWI, so it was changed to the more patriotic Kitchener in 1916. We've still got a German flavour around here though. Kitchener hosts the largest Bavarian Oktoberfest outside of Munich.
A few years later I discovered board games (Avalon Hill and later SPI) and then D&D. I didn't play too much miniature gaming any more - mostly a lack of funds. (How kids today can afford GW products is beyond me. I can't even afford them...'course I've got a mortgage, wife, child, car payments, Mastercard bills...) Although I do remember buying Airfix 20mm plastic figures, but being extremely disappointed at my wonderful painting attempts sloughing off the soldier in great flakes. I drifted back into miniature gaming as my interest in Role Playing Games dwindled. I had a large collection of painted figures from the RPG days, so quickly impressed them into wargaming service, mostly against my brother using the 1st Edition GW Warhammer© rules. Even then my historical bent asserted itself; we ignored the horrible magic rules and my Roman legionnaires ignored the fact that their opponents were green-skinned. But it wasn't until DBA that I really threw myself into miniature wargaming. I still buy the occasional Strategy & Tactics magazine, but as much as I hate to admit it, purely for nostalgic reasons. I find the hobby of miniature wargaming much more rewarding, and much more relaxing than board gaming ever was. My latest hobby (not that I'm leaving wargaming!) is this webpage. I worked for a spell as a computer programmer (my first real job actually) before drifting out of the field. Sadly there seems little call nowadays for 6502 programmers. Now I find myself learning Flash, HTML, MySQL, perl, PHP, ASP, Java, Visual Basic and JavaScript just for the fun of it all. That's about it - so feel free to keep browsing and sign my guestbook if you wish.
---Tony Stapells
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As for wargaming - I remember playing with Britain's 54 mm plastic figures when I was about ten or so. By the time I reached twelve years of age, my friend and I had developed our own ACW rules. Somewhat simple and extremely bloody as I recall. H.G. Wells would have been proud of them, although we did use dice.
We did have a Roman vs New Kingdom Egyptian battle using Atlantic (I think) figures. The Romans were actually from the Gladiators box set and were well outnumbered by the Egyptian force. So we quickly cobbled together rules for using the lions and bears as Roman reinforcements.