Over 40 of SPI's games are in my closet and although they are only a part of my much larger game collection they are the by far most popular, here at the North Georgia Military College (one of only four of such colleges in the U.S.). The cadets here who are very studied on naval, land and air tactics find them playable, realistic and exciting. They cannot understand why SPI has been under such strong critisims in the past months in PANZERFAUST and other magazines. Representing the College Wargame Club, I would like to reply to those critisms.

SPI game quality is often questioned chiefly in reference to errata sheets published after many of their games are released. They may seem extensive at times but actually there is very seldom enough wrong with a SPI game for a errata sheet to improve very much.

Many other companies put out errata sheets but SPI seems to be being singled out. Avalon Hill's questions and answers section of the GENERAL is really a errata sheet and remember those articles in the old GENERALs that read "D-Day New Rules Released" etc. that were the yearly corrections of the AH games. Even today many articles on making AH games realistic and correcting its rules are published by many magazines including PANZERFAUST.

Many of the AH game rules are even subject to different interpretations in different regions of the country.

SPI may publish errata sheets but at least they have the integety to do so while most game companies don't, SPI should be complemented not critized for their caring enough to send prompt, complete, errata sheets (at only the cost of a postage stamp) to their customers and these many other companies should be "drug over the coals" in PF for not doing so when in all but a few cases they need to.

Another of the often heard critisms is the lack of realism in SPI games. Most of these critics simply have not played the games enough to see the realism. The typical SPI game requires 3 to 4 playings to get the hang of it, but so do most other games (remember your first few games of AFRIKA KORPS?).

The more you play a particular SPI game and look at the game overall as to who took what and when the more the usually inventive game system makes sense a and the more realistic the game becomes. Between equal, normal, and experienced players, in terms of the game being played, the vast majority of SPI games are pretty realistic although I do agree with Tom Oleson's view of ARDENNES OFFENSIVE and LE GRANDE ARMEE as being somewhat unrealistic (Harold Totten: Those are the Exceptions not the Norms, PF61).

Other SPI games such as SINAI do have unrealistic victory conditions, as far as who "won" originally but they make the game balanced as far as playing goes (why haven't the same critisms, been made of Conflict Games' KASSERINE PASST) without making the course of the game unrealistic. The classic example of a SPI game that fits the above is their new AMERICAN CIVIL WAR game. It took three games before I was experienced enough to play a game which was similar to what actually occured and then its seemingly weird game system made sense.

The last major critism of SPI is that it puts out too many games to buy and play all of them, As SPI points out they are not trying to sell everyone every game they put out, but try to provide a large variety where each of their customers can pick games from his favorite time periods and subjects. This attempt to please as many people as possible is a concept the other game companies are just starting to pick up but has been very successful at SPI.

If quality suffered from quantity, I don't think we miss the difference, but would miss the advantages. According to a recent poll, it seems most SPI customers agree--although SPI would like to put out fewer games to devote more resources to their retail sales.

SPI has done more for wargaming than any other company. They came up with such firsts as a game with every issue of a magazine, tactical tank board games, and a complaint system that answers and corrects mistakes. They broke up a monopoly of one game company putting out one usually poor quality game a year and forced all game companies to strive for SPI's high playability and realism.

We have all benefitted from this and continue with each new game system developed by Dunnigan and company.

So, who's complaining?