Sue Laflin-Barker's Start Ancient Wargaming Using Dba 3.0

If you are completely new to DBA and have picked up the main rulebook by Phil Barker, Sue's husband, you may have been a bit dumbfounded by its layout and Phil's verbose and often confusing writing style. Sue's companion book is both an intro to wargaming and DBA. It also goes into better detail on the rules, which are found in their entirety here, and a decent portion of the massive lists of armies found in DBA 3.0. Recommend for anyone trying to learn DBA without the help of experienced players to assist you!

If you have never done any war gaming this a a decent introduction to the hobby. It includes the authors personal journey into historical war gaming and some background on the development of the hobby. it includes DBA .0 rules and a sample match on how they are applied.. The writing style itself is dry and dull and the DBA charts are not formatted for easy use. Its an okay way to grab a copy of DBA.0 minus the army lists. I feel that it is a little over priced for what you get. I was expecting more

The quickness of play and the accommodation of somewhat larger armies. It is my belief that the DBA series of games gave and extended the life of historical gaming in the periods addressed. John C.

Classic fast-play miniatures wargaming rules, complete with a few army lists -- not all, but certainly enough to get you going. I play DBA regularly, & if you're looking for a relatively easy set to acquire & play, I'd recommend it.

This book provides a great and easy to learn set of rules for many ancient and medieval wargames. The sample army lists, I find, are a great thing to build upon. For a gallic army i just took the cimbri/ teuton germanic army list and made it more cavalry heavy. I was even able to get my dad interested in wargaming using this book.

This is an excellent introduction to ancient-era wargaming, and provides a relatively inexpensive look at the 3.0 edition of the DBA rules. (It is also the only way at present to get a digital edition of those rules.) The provision of approximately fifty army lists, organized by historical conflict, is a welcome addition, and Ms. Laflin-Barker's commentary on each conflict and each army is informative and entertaining.

This is an excellent book for anyone wanting to get started into the great hobby of wargaming historical events. The book covers getting together armies of toy soldiers, painting them, and making terrain to put on a tabletop to re-create battles. A sample game is shown which explains quite nicely the rules of the game. There are quite a few pairs of armies presented, with background to the conflicts they were involved in, to allow people to create historical match ups for games. I have been playing games for 40 years and I still found much in here of use. A newbie should find very much rewarding material. A must for any wargamer's library, even if not interested in ancients.

I highly recommend this to any fan of the genre. One of my new favorite games.

I like DBA 3 a lot. I'm not an expert painter or modeler. I understand this book is an introduction to DBA so why only 2 stars? Firstly let me say that a lot has changed since the early days of wargaming and playing with Airfix figures on the floor but the author of this book is blissfully unaware of this. She mentions not undercoating figures (although she doesn't recommend it?), uses poster paints and varnishes figures using nail varnish. The photographs are frankly awful with some out of focus ones. The example of play is okay but has some laughable elements with the two opponents knowing some of the more obscure rules but not the obvious ones. The section of army lists are probably the highlight. However if you cannot buy the main rules set then this is the only way you can get hold of the rules which are currently unavailable. If I were a cynic I would say may be these two issues are linked. I feel the editor, John Curry, should have intervened more. I think my copy will be heading to the land of eBay.

I got this as I was interested In getting an insight into DBA as a simple set of ancient war gaming rules. This wasn’t it. The rules themselves are stupidly complicated with the use of abbreviations and troop types with anarchic names. I can’t understand why these rules are so popular based on this read,

I wanted to return to wargaming after a break of 35 years, if this book depicts the progress from the Barkers WGR rules of my earlier wargaming then I'm bitterly disappointed. The book in itself is poor and a waste of money but at least it has saved me from wasting any further time or resources, hopefully not all periods have deteriorated the same way, but as of now it's farewell to Ancient wargaming

I quite liked it, but then am thinking about starting to play ancient wargaming. It has some poor reviews, but I imagine they are mostly from people who have been ancient wargaming for years. However, I haven't, I haven't even started yet. I am interested in it, hoped I could interest some of my friends and wanted something to show them so that they knew what I was talking about.

This book is not worth buying.It was created by a bunch of amateurs who have not even bothered to proof read their book.Full of poor black and white photos.Full of spelling mistakes and incorrect tenses.The army lists do not match those in the DBA v3.0 book. Instead they have inconsistent terminology for the same troop type.