Did you ever play "in Search of the Nile?" Dynamite map drawing game system tailor made for computerization. I thought it was one of the better systems for creating a realistic map that was different in every game. There was a great abundance of economic games simulating various aspects of environmental balance conflicts.

We had open ended R+D in various theatres. In one island hopping naval campaign, I developed sea planes with hydrofoil landing gear, while another guy developed submersible landing craft, damn near invisible on moonless nights. The point of it all was to develop stuff that was engineeringly viable but surprise capabilities that the enemy might not imagine, then incorporate it in our arsenals and tactics, in which enemies did not know how we were accomplishing some stuff unless they got at wreckage after winning a conflict and there was evidence they could make heads or tails of.

This was a moderated game system that applied to many many different theatres. I ran one in which an alien star ship was observed decelerating into our solar system, then sent a lander into a remote area of our planet. The UN is debating this and various nations armed forces are cordoning off the area. You, the player, are part of the native population inside the cordon and the game is one of competition between other people seeking to be first to get at the alien technologies, expected to have great economic value.

In a game system called "WW II Europe and Africa", each nation had a different economic system and the military time table did not need to follow history. We had a battle for Iceland and developed long range aircraft refueled by tankers based there. That kind of game was somewhat limited by the sizes of the nations. Some players would play a single nation like Spain was one of the Axis powers played by one person. Russia had separate commanders for Army North South Central on their Eastern Front. Britain had separate commanders for naval operations in different theatres.

There were quite a few games with multi-tiered commanders, with a different style game being played at each level. At a high level it was resource allocation and grand strategic. At a lower level it was a continuing need to perform good with limited resources or else you'd be replaced by some other would-be commander.

There were many games on premise of aftermath of some disaster, like nuclear winter with survivors battling automated relics. I remember a dungeon game at a convention in Columbus where several player parties were in the same place concurrently ... weird stuff encountered could be those other guys. There was a dungeon game in which we hunted the wild animals down there for food to sustain our journey and they hunted us for the same reasons. Mapping included capturing and questioning intelligent critters whose percentage of truthfulness was racial ... capture several and ask them a question that you know the answer to ... that helps us measure their reliability. Weird critters, whose names could be computer generated, but was done through drawing index cards with the syllables making up the name of some newly encountered species, had various features unknown to the players, determined when they were first introduced into any game, such as percentage truthful answers when captured, and their combat repetoire.

Combat was resolved using the "En Garde'" system except the pointy weapons included claws and other body parts of vicious animals. Our sub-commanders were genetically bred for various attributes such as intelligence, whose definition included ability to follow orders.

Check out my recent articles in SGS's Strategist on how I think command and control, military intelligence, logistics, supply lines, etc. could be realistically represented with contemporary computer capabilities, to enhance realism in areas that are often lacking in today's war games. My favorite stuff today, in terms of amount of time consumed playing them, are empire-building economic geography games like Transport Tycoon, but when my personal leisure time improves, I want to explore forum thread infrastructure for abstract logic game interaction, like a time travel game I developed 30 years ago.

Hope that I have been entertaining while describing some game systems that I have enjoyed in the past, outside of computers, and hope that some day in the future I will once again get to experience them, inside computers.