Type the word "wargame" into the Alta Vista search engine and you will get 28,990 hits. While many of these are probably defunct or duplicate citations, the simple fact is that there are a lot of wargaming pages on the web. Boardgaming may be a dying hobby, but one would never notice this from the Internet.

Most hobbies or interests have one major site that will start Internet surfers off in the right direction. For wargamers, this place is Web-Grognards, accurately subtitled "the site for wargames on the web." Grognards is the project of Alan Poulter, one of the more energetic figures in the hobby, who maintains and updates the site almost weekly. The URL is www.grognard.com.

The heart of Web-Grognards is the alphabetical wargames listing. Most historical simulations are recorded here, along with nearly every link possible. These links include reviews, strategy articles, errata, variants, indices, other sites, and computer aids. Anyone seeking to explore or study virtually any game should start here.

Not content with just connecting people to specific simulation sites, Grognards has links to many wargame publishers, clubs, online publications, sellers, homepages, and convention reports. There are computer and railroad gaming sections, but not much for card or role-players. Miniatures are treated in some depth. Grognards can also connect you to free board, computer, and card games, as well as role-playing and miniature rules.

Web-Grognards has a section discussing wargaming listserves and Usenet groups, including instructions for access. Furthermore, there are lots of databases, such as simulations printed in various publications, magazine indices, e-mail addresses, and types of wargames sorted by category (e.g. solitaire, subject). Finally, the site has GDW's Battle of Moscow available for downloading, and a weekly challenge (identify a game from its map and counters and win fame, but no fortune.)

Start with this site, and you will never turn off your computer long enough to actually play wargames again. Highly recommended.

The Wargamer's Ring

There are some thirty million websites on the Internet and even the best search engines will access only a third of them. One way to navigate the Web is to go to someone’s page and then follow their links. In fact, some home pages seem to exist solely for the purpose of sending you around the Internet. Many sites are constructed like "Hi! I'm Alfreda. Here's a picture of my pet Basset Hound Seymour. Here's a link to the Basset Hound Championship Racing Circuit Page." You click the underlined text or a picture and soon you are gambling illegally on Basset Hound races in Australia. The BHCRCP would also have its own links to otherBasset Hound places. Sooner or later, you will hit most of the relevant sites.

The WebRing system is an attempt to rationalize this process. Simply put, after creating your home page, you link it to other websites organized around a common theme. For example, Alfreda would probably join the "Basset Hound Ring" (58 sites as of 5/7/98). Overall, there are 38,000+ webrings joining people of almost every conceivable interest. Each of these rings is a web advertiser's dream. As the WebRing people like to point out, it was so obvious.

The WebRing home page (www.webring.org) includes a search machine. Entering "game" brought up over 600 rings. "Wargame" found 31. The largest of these is the Wargamer's Ring with about 170 members. As with other webrings, you can access a list of member sites. If you are on a webpage, you can go to one at random, see a list of the previous or next five sites, or travel to the preceding or next website in the ring. The Wargamer's Ring offers an interesting assortment of members, with an emphasis on miniature, computer, and Internet games. There are also pages from individuals, retailers, and small companies. Board-games, CCGs, and RPGs are represented lightly, but the Ring does have links to the major boardgame sites and companies on its start page (www.freeyellow.com/members2/micro/index.htm).

This is an interesting, fast-growing Ring (up from 30 members a fewmonths ago) which can connect you to an eclectic array of websites. However, the index pages load slowly and the member sites are organized in the order they joined, not by any kind of logical category. It can take a while to find a particular site using the Ring. Still, you can discover a lot of obscure sites and it is worth the effort. Even better, you can create your own page and join in. It's free.