My interest in military history goes back to age 8 and Airfix models. I was an addicted wargamer and collector from age 12 – now 40 years later I have a collection of over 50,000 wargames figures spanning every period of history and some of the future too! I won the IWF world wargaming championships three times in the 2000s and spent many years as the no 1 ranked player in the world.

While a regular event player, my main interest is in re-enacting campaigns and historical battles. Through my working years I found a travel companion in the Total War series by CA, playing it to completion on planes and in hotels all over the world. Shogun, Rome, Medeival were all game I played to a conclusion as every faction!

My interest in using colour and custom dice and cards for games started around 2005. In 2007, custom dice and a custom card pack were at the heart of a self-published family game called Caveman.

2008 saw me create a strategy game called Colors. We launched it at Essen 2008 with a free copy for anyone who could beat me. While a straightforward game, it is very tricky to play well. Somebody finally beat me in an epic struggle on the last day (on the third attempt).

That year, I was also one of the lead creators of the highly successful Field of Glory Ancient wargaming rules published by Osprey Publishing. While now almost twenty years old, these rules are still played by enthusiasts around the world, and the tabletop rules led to a series of computer games.

Mortem et Gloriam was launched in 2016 as a self-published game and was then finalised and published by PSC in 2020 as a compendium edition. It was the first Ancient main battle set to win a Wargames Illustrated award (as these are usually dominated by 28mm skirmish games). Today MeG is one of the leading rulesets for big battle play and has a following of around 3000 player that is growing all the time.

In 2020, while living in South Africa, I participated in helping PSC to agree the license to produce a board game version of Total War Rome. After some challenges with the design, I stepped in with my in-depth knowledge of the computer game to create a design that worked in a way that gave the right feel of the original computer epic. Over time it has evolved such that I have become not just the lead designer but the publisher of the project, working in conjunction with Creative Assembly, to recover it to where it is today.

This game is launching formally at Spiel 2024 on October 2nd. I hope this will be the beginning of a long partnership with CA to bring various Total War titles onto the board game table. An expansion based on Alexander the Great will be published in 2025. And while this has been going on, we have created tabletop figure rules for other periods and have more in the pipeline: Renatio et Gloriam (now published by Helion Publishing) for the renaissance period, Battalions of Steel for WW2, Cannons & Rifles for the ACW, Gloire de Guerre for Napoleonics and SYW, Mortem et Dracones for fantasy battles and even Invasion Earth for Sci-fi.