About a year from now, not too far away as time seems to go today, board wargaming will pass a significant milestone, our forty-fifth anniversary, at least as measured from the moment of the appearance of Tactics II, the first popularly available wargame, designed by Charles Roberts and published by The Avalon Hill Game Company. Much has happened since, not least the demise of Avalon Hill, now a mere product line for the Hasbro Corporation, today's monster in the game industry. It is not a bad idea to return to those age-old questions, where have we been, where are we going, and where are we to look for the good simulation games. For those lately arrived upon the scene a commentary on the evolution of gaming is in order. The hobby, industry, or whatever we choose to call it has passed through a number of broad phases. At first there was broad fascination with the medium, coinciding with a steady expansion of Avalon Hill into and through the 1960s. The hobby matured during the period of the 1970s and into the 80s, an era which featured the creation of most of the elements that still characterize our milieu today. Avalon Hill became just one among many game companies, challenged for dominance and surpassed in innovation by others. Developments included the magazine with a game in it, still a staple in the hobby, indeed the place where you are reading this rumination. Gainers began to put a premium on game design technique, emphasizing the quality of simulation, a desire that remains with us today. New kinds of games appeared, including designs of greater size ("monster" games), very small ones ("folio" games), and games that included rather sophisticated rules systems intended to simulate increasingly arcane aspects of real world situations. We also got new genres of games, most notably science fiction and fantasy designs. The names of the companies hardly matter any more, though old line gamers still debate the relative merits of products from companies like Simulations Publications Incorporated (SPI) or Game Designers Workshop. As with Avalon Hill, SPI still exists as a product line of Decision Games, as does its flagship publication, Strategy & Tactics. Clubs and groupings of gamers also emerged during that era, and their efforts to host tournaments and larger gatherings led to game conventions, among which the first were Origins and Gencon, again shows that still take place every year. At its inception Origins was a show devoted primarily board wargames, while Gencon focused on the fantasy end of the hobby. Historical miniatures gamers were prominent participants at Origins from almost the beginning and also began holding their own large conventions. The 1980s brought changes that define more closely the shape of the hobby today. Widespread appearance of personal computers created a demand for computer games. Fantasy and science fiction grew to such proportions as to eclipse the wargame side of the hobby. Propelled by systems for role- playing, such as Dungeons & Dragons, which first appeared in the 70s but truly took off in the next decade; fantasy games in particular became huge. Wargamers initially welcomed these developments as promises of an expanded universe of gaming that would bring more people into the board strategy games, but there was much less crossover of roleplayers entering the wargame side than of wargamers experimenting with D&D and the other systems. Companies came and went, as has long been the case in gaming, with the phenomenon of acquisition becoming pronounced. SPI was absorbed by the D&D publishers, TSR Hobbies, itself to disappear later. Game Designers Workshop sold off some product lines (notably the Europa series games) but the company itself was not acquired and simply went out of business. This kind of thing has happened repeatedly, more recently, for example, with the company Multiman, which acquired the Advanced Squad Leader and Civil War series games from Avalon Hill before that company's own sale to Hasbro. The cycle was, and remains, that companies are created by gamers dedicated to producing some favorite design. In the 1990s the most important production development would be card games, many collectible others not, typified by Wizards of the Coast (WOTC), which produced Magic and later Pokemon. That company literally started out in a garage, yet by the turn of the millennium had a brief reign as the monster game company before being acquired by--you guessed it--the Hasbro Corporation. Before that happened WOTC itself had acquired the Gencon show and had important interests in Origins. Creativity cycles and corporate patterns have both bad and good consequences for the board wargamer. On the unfortunate side the concentration that has taken place in large corporations limits the number of new titles that become available, and to some degree also limits design innovation, because the corporation's concern with selling enough product and grasping for shelf space in the chain stores tends to favor simple or simplistic games. There is some silver lining behind this cloud since the company can afford high quality components, and because we gamers have less and less time to devote to playing these days. On the other hand, it is more difficult for the large corporation to incorporate design innovation. For example, one notable design innovation of the 90s has been the card-driven game system, typified by Avalon Hill's Hannibal and now championed by GMT Games. Hasbro's Avalon Hill line has so far produced only watered-down versions of this innovation in its games. The mention of GMT leads to discussion of the good side of this phenomenon. Every year at the game shows, whether Origins or the now-standard wargame convention World Boardgame Championship (Doncon), there are small companies with booths and just one, or a few products, or maybe just mockups for a future game design. A recent example is Eagle Games, which began with a Civil War strategic game design, progressed to its fine War in the Age of Imperialism, and promises a Napoleonic game in the not too distant future. Today's top rank of real wargame companies, including Avalanche Press, GMT, Clash of Arms, The Gamers, and Operational Studies Group, not to mention Against the Odds, all began this way. Small companies are notoriously undercapitalized and vulnerable in a shrinking market. New companies of this sort show up every year and many are gone the next. The ones that make their mark comprise gamers determined to bring their products to the public. Typically the owners are the designers of the initial game or games, people who had great ideas for designs but thought the corporations would not buy them, or they actually tried but failed to sell the game ideas and are taking a shot on their own accounts. The designs are most frequently labors of love, and what they are missing in inexperienced rules writing they make up for in fresh innovation. Small company designs, with Eagle Games as a case in point (its titles have molded plastic pieces as fine as Hasbro's), are also quite often surprisingly good in terms of components. How the innovators on their shoestring budgets manage this is impossible to know, especially given how established companies will tell a designer he cannot have a certain kind of component due to the exorbitant cost entailed. The basic structure of our hobby today remains similar to that of earlier periods. There is a monster corporation, Hasbro. Behind it are a number of larger, more established companies, most of which we have mentioned. The economics are different for the market has shrunk, which means the second- rank companies are closer than ever to the shoestring of the startups. These producers often have only enough money to put out their next product, and increasingly they rely upon pre-orders to publish anything at all. There remains a constant stream of hopeful game designers with fresh ideas, but the production process is more constrained than before, both for the monster corporation and the larger companies. Survey results (feedback) used to help executives choose a direction for their publication schedules, now the survey has to be backed by dollars to make a game appear. In a way this amounts to publication on demand, and will have the effect of further constricting innovation, making it harder for novice designers to break into the field and for innovations in simulation to see the light of day. The monster company has vulnerabilities of a different sort as well. Hasbro Corporation has acquired so much so quickly and for so much cash that there must be some question as to its ability to absorb all the new elements. In other areas of publishing, acquisition often leads to old standbys being eliminated, such as backlist books. One has to wonder if Hasbro will be tempted to move in that direction as well. In addition the large corporation with its multifarious concerns may simply lose interest, something which happened previously with Hasbro predecessors Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers, which gave up board strategy games they had had in the 1960s. Current indications are that the Hasbro boardgames are strong components of their product line, but this may not always remain the case. All this leads us back to the startups. Unlike the situation in the early days of the hobby today there is a well-understood process for creating a game company and putting its design into production. Games from the startups are not creatures of on-demand publishing, or of companies caught in the cash flow trap. These games often have quite good quality components. The startup games are also a frequent locale for sophisticated innovation in game design. In short-support your local startup game company! Forty-five years on, wargaming may have passed a golden age, but it is far from being either in infancy or at expiration. The range of product today is unparalleled in scope and range of subjects, and far advanced over the dawn of the genre, when the games were the same system only differing in subject, title, and box art. Then too there were only a couple of games a year to choose from. For all the constraints on publication, gaming today is far removed from that. Perhaps there will be another great age to look forward to. Back to Table of Contents -- Against the Odds vol. 1 no. 2 Back to Against the Odds List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2003 by LPS. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com * Buy this back issue or subscribe to Against the Odds direct from LPS.