If you can play the guitar, music can become interactive. You are no longer just listening to music, you’re taking part in it. If you play a wargame, you can make history interactive. You are no longer just reading about it, you’re re-enacting it, and at the same time wargamers are seeing and manipulating what might have been. Rarely do players chose to refight a carbon copy of a battle, which means just about every wargame ever played is a ‘what if’, making this month’s theme content very easy to compile, but tricky to introduce, beyond the obvious “all games are ‘what if’s so away you go”.

We decided that for our introduction to ‘what if’ (see page 32), we would ask several different gamers what ‘what if’s mean to them and how they go about choosing them and turning them into gameable tabletop actions.

That introduction is accompanied by several articles with a ‘what if’ angle, taking you from the streets of medieval Paris to the South China Sea in the 21st Century. We are also pleased to present several excellent painting and modelling articles this month, covering big guns, French Railway Stations, Normans, and this month’s freebie figures.