I owned a copy of that game a long time ago. You're right, it was produced by SPI and called "Strategy I". One of the few things I remember about it is that the map was divided into 24 provinces or countries, each beginning with a different letter, A to X. Some of the countries bore a slight resemblance to real ones, such as Palestan which was a narrow coastal strip in a desert region. The were rules for about 18 different periods (I think), and they included production, naval warfare, and, where relevant, air warfare. Unit counters came in 6 colours, for multiplayer games. IIRC, there were eighteen different scenarios, but considerably fewer periods. In addition, not all of them included production rules, being short games. The "period" rules were not normally spelled out, but you could figure them out well enough from the scenarios. (The naval rules were an exception, coming as they did in four periods - the first two using the aircraft counters rather than the ship counters.)

The game had a lot of expansion potential that went mostly unused. The map was somewhat geomorphic, coming in two sheets that could be put together as two full sheets or partially folded. The counters were designed to be as generic as possible, and IIRC there were rules that were not actually used by any of the scenarios.

Due to lack of opponents, I only played it once, a multiplayer game set in the Middle Ages. As far as I remember, it played quite well. But I've never seen any articles about it or spoken to anyone else who's played it. It would be interesting to hear from anyone who really got to grips with it.

I mostly played the WWII scenarios, and that played quite well also. I played some of the other scenarios solitaire, and they seemed to work nicely. Overall, I thought it was very well done.

As you've mentioned, once released it mostly disappeared. SPI did do a second edition with cleaned-up components, but there it died. One big problem was doubtless its ahistorical layout; I can't think of a single game after Blitzkrieg that succeeded with a made-up geography in a more-or-less historical setting.

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