By Way of Introduction

Permit me to make a few comments regarding what this blog is, and isn't, about.

I started wargaming in a serious way around 1974, and finally left wargaming behind around 1988 or so. My cultural wargaming milieu consists mainly of companies like SPI and GDW. I subscribed to S&T, Ares, and Moves. Though I didn't subscribe to them, I slavishly bought every copy of The General, Fire & Movement and The Space Gamer that appeared at any of my local game stores.

I liked SPI games. I liked realism at the expense of playability or balance. I liked half-inch matte-finish counters and paper maps. I liked monster games. I bought CAMPAIGN FOR NORTH AFRICA and WAR IN THE PACIFIC. I actually played games like THE NEXT WAR and DRANG NACH OSTEN. I had TERRIBLE SWIFT SWORD set up in a spare bedroom for about six months.

But I never really recovered from the shock of SPI being taken over by TSR. Actually, I think it was the shock of finding out that TSR had no intention of honoring my freshly-renewed S&T subscription that really did me in. Somehow the end of SPI and the dissolution of GDW seemed to be as good a marker of the end of an era as anything else, and I have to say I haven't really liked most of the "modern" wargames I've bought over the last decade. Desktop publishing has brought whole new vistas of graphical polish to moderm games, but I'm not convinced that the games are better in any systematic sense.

But I wasn't a hex-and-counter snob. I got into role-playing games with equal fervor, and starting at approximately the same time. I was a huge DUNGEONS & DRAGONS geek, though I do have to confess that I never bought any D&D rules after ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. But unlike a lot of D&D players, I wasn't married to D&D. A partial list of role-playing games I've played over the years includes D&D, TWILIGHT: 2000, TRAVELER, TUNNELS & TROLLS, THE MORROW PROJECT, GAMMA WORLD, BOOT HILL, DRAGONQUEST, UNIVERSE... There are more, but you get the idea.

Curiously, one thing I've never really gotten into in the so-called "Euro-Game", things like CARCASSONE or SETTLERS OF CATAN. Hex-and-counter wargames? Count me in! Role-playing games? The more the better! Wooden playing pieces representing pigs? Hmm. Maybe not so much.

So what is this blog about? It's about the games I played in the Salad Days of Wargaming. Things like PGG, TOBRUK, STARSOLDIER and NEXT WAR. Things like D&D, TRAVELER and ARDUIN. Companies like SPI, GDW, Metagaming, Avalon Hill and Task Force Games.

Them were the days!