Phil Barker (born 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 became 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.