This may be old hat to many of you, but today was a sad day for me; I received a copy of Computer Games Strategy Plus in lieu of my usual copy of The General. While you all knew this was coming for months, the reality still hits me hard. The sad part is it (Avalon Hill's demise) is partly my fault. I've been a wargamer for over twenty years now. I once was even part of the industry as a designer and developer. Through it all, through good times and bad, I've subscribed to The General, even though I'm not an ASL fan and I haven't bought an AH game in years.

That's the crux of my guilt. I have always thought that board gaming was a great hobby, but I did little to nothing to support it over the last ten years. I find board games with their personal interaction infinitely richer than computer games, yet I buy two or three computer games a year while usually buying one or none adult board games. Part of this is due to apathy, part of it is due to my reluctance to try and introduce new people to the hobby, although I have often thought of trying to convert some of my poker buddies.

AH had more than its share of warts, but I mourn its passing even more than I mourned the passing of two later contemporaries, SPI and TSR. Like SPI and TSR, AH never mastered marketing and never came close to their full potential, but nevertheless provided some sort of a standard that most of us could relate to. And how many of my generation can remember being introduced to this great hobby through Tactics II, Waterloo, and Blitzkreig?

Usually when we look back at the past and wish we could go back, we gloss over the faults of the era. With all its faults, today is in many ways the best era man (and woman) has ever known. Nevertheless, I do, in many ways, wish I could go back to the "glory days" of AH, SPI, TSR, GDW, and Metagaming.

It is often said that if you don't care about something, ignore it and it will go away. While that's not true about many things, it is true about this hobby. Without financial support, wargame (to use an more and more archaic term) companies and wargame stores will continue to wither and die. While I fully embrace computers and the internet, few can deny that it's not more fun to go down to a fully-stocked shop and actually see and touch new releases, and even more importantly, meet people with similar interests. The problem is, those shops won't remain if we don't patronize them.

Maybe my words are just the lamentations of a man growing older, but I feel sorry for the youth who have missed out on the gaming of my youth...all the Quakes and Dooms in the world are less fulfilling than one afternoon around a gaming table full of friends....