Please give some background information about yourself.

I graduated from Iowa State University with a degree in journalism in 1980. Went to work at the Peoria Journal Star. Left there in 1981 and took a job at TSR, Inc. as an editor. I intended to stay there about a year and then go back to newspaper work but I wound up staying at TSR for 16 years. Moved from Wisconsin to Seattle in 2001. Now I work for Hasbro managing the Avalon Hill website and contributing to the Wizards of the Coast website.

How, where, when and why did you become interested in wargaming?

I was always interested in the concept even before I knew such a thing as "wargaming" existed. In the mid 70s I discovered a shelf of Avalon Hill games in a department store where I worked evenings, selling cameras. I bought Third Reich with my employee discount but after poring over it for 24 hours, a friend and I still couldn't figure out how to play it. I gave up on 3R and got The Russian Campaign instead, which we were able to play. A month later I bought Tobruk, and that really lit us on fire. We practically wore the pips off our dice playing Tobruk.

I played Avalon Hill games exclusively for a couple of years because I didn't know anything else existed until I went to Iowa State University. I was proofreading classified ads for the campus newspaper when I saw the ad for the ISU Garners. Hoping to find opponents for my wargames, I went to a meeting. Instead of finding wargamers, everyone was playing D&D and Traveller. That was my first encounter with roleplaying, and it led to a whole new obsession and eventually a job at TSR.

My involvement with miniatures started while I was working at TSR. A lot of the people there were miniatures gamers from before the advent of D&D. It was the combination of Larry Brom's The Sword & the Flame rules and the beautiful Ral Partha Zulu War figures that started me spending money on lead figures of my own. I really don't know why colonials grabbed me the way they did. I knew next to nothing about the period or the wars. I hadn't even seen the movie "Zulu" at that time. There was just something about the image of a handful of red-coated British facing thousands of Zulus that sparked my imagination. At the time I couldn't have picked out Zululand on a map of Africa but I somehow knew that Zulus were cool.

We were pretty hardcore SPI gamers at TSR, too. It was rare for us to go more than a few months without a game of Terrible Swift Sword, Wellington's Victory, Gleam of Bayonets, WW2: ETO, La Battaile de la Moskowa, Highway to the Reich, Operation Typhoon, you name it. If it was a multi-map monster game that took months to play, we probably tackled it at some point.

What periods, scales do you use? What are the sizes of your collections in these periods? What attracts you to a particular period?

Most of my figures are 25/28mm but I have some 15s (for playing DBA and HOTTs) and a whole lot of Perrin 10mm figures for the Zulu War. Oh, and quite a bit of microarmor -- including infantry -- mostly for North Africa. There's the influence of Tobruk. I like the small figures for WW2 because they're the only way to capture the emptiness of a WW2 battlefield. I like the 10mm figures for the Zulu War because they let you do wide flanking maneuvers and have wagon columns that stretch on and on realistically. I like 25/28s for just about everything else because they're the most fun to paint, build scenery for, and play with.

Like most wargamers, I've experimented in lots of periods. I started with the Ral Partha colonials - Zulu War, Northwest Frontier, Sudan. Those are still some of the bestlooking miniatures ever produced, for my money. I dabbled in ACW for a while but never seriously. All those figures finally got sold on eBay several years ago. Next was WW2 in HO scale and microarmor.

Then I discovered Wargames Foundry. I bought a bunch of Foundry Thirty Years War figures just because they were so well sculpted. That led to a lasting interest in the 30YW and pike and shot warfare in general, something I'd never had any interest in at all before that.

My collection of figures for any one period is usually fairly small. I like small games. It's hard to keep a miniatures game really engaging when you put more than a hundred or two figures on the table and line up more than four players. I enjoy skirmish games, plus they're a great way to experiment in new periods. Ultimately, I lean toward the idea that a game should be built with the smallest number of figures possible. More on that below.

Regarding scenarios, what do you think makes for an interesting game?

That's a wide-open question.

Like I said above, I like small games. I like games that have lots of maneuver. I've never been a fan of big, setpiece battles where a dozen players push their units straight ahead to crunch into whatever is in front of them. A game that relies on attrition to reach a conclusion has problems. The more unoccupied space you have on the table, the more options players have and the more maneuver there will be. The only way to have unoccupied space is to not fill it with figures.

A well-constructed scenario needs multiple objectives, time pressure, a sense of desperation, and a demand to do more than you can with the available resources.

I had something of a scenario- design epiphany two years ago at Cold Wars.

First I played in Mark Fastoso's colonial game about Italians in Ethiopia. Mark designs superb scenarios. They have a mathematical precision that's stunning.

Second, I played Dave Waxtell's "Charge of the Light Brigade" game. He accomplished exactly what I'd been trying to for years with rules like Myei's Drift, Rorke's Drift, and The Last Outpost. His rules were absolutely simple and wouldn't work for any situation other than this particular charge. Instead of focusing on historical details and the intricacies of cavalry maneuver and artillery fire, everything was geared toward capturing the general feel of that one engagement and making the game fast and fun.

Those two experiences combined with things I'd been doing, games I'd been playing, and thoughts that had been percolating through my head for a long time. The end result was a realization that what was missing from most wargames was the game. People design scenarios that are little more than a map, an OB, and a set of one- size-fits-all rules. Rather than scenarios, I try to design games with historical settings and themes.

What do you personally look for in a set of rules? What level of combat do you usually try and portray on the tabletop?

I have a preference for skirmish games. Maybe it's my background in role-playing games. I like all levels, though. I've often wondered why no one has ever done an operational or strategic level miniatures game. You look at something like Napoleonics - Napoleon's genius was operational and strategic but miniatures games all focus on tactics. I think that's why Napoleonic gaming is sometimes sort of frustrating. Ultimately, studying battlefield tactics of the Napoleonic wars won't teach you much about what made Napoleon tick.

A good set of rules should be simple first and foremost. That's why I'm so devoted to The Sword and the Flame. It might seem like a contradiction that I'm also a big fan of Advanced Squad Leader, but I think it is a much simpler game than it gets credit for. I like rules with lots of randomness functioning on multiple levels. I like rules that take a different approach to achieve something and not just to be different. That's why two of my favorite sets of miniatures rules are TS&TF and DBA. Both are groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting games.

Has your experience as a professional writer helped you develop your own style of wargaming? Do you use some of the same tools such as plot development, setting, and characterization for game and scenario design?

Writing techniques play a bigger role in designing a campaign than they do in designing a set of rules or a game scenario. That's where you need to think about tension, rising action, and dramatic climax. In a set of rules or a scenario, I'm thinking more about math, statistics, probability, and movement rates vis-6-vis table size and desired outcomes. You want a dramatic climax in a scenario but you achieve it by carefully juggling movement rates and probability.

You were a long time editor and designer of games for TSR. Please tell us about your experiences as a professional game designer.

TSR was a great place to work; a dream job. It really was a "game designer's workshop," if I can borrow the name of that other company to describe TSR. I went to work there in 1981 as an editor -- the first professional, trained editor the company ever had. I was already a wargamer and roleplayer but I didn't know much about designing games. We worked so closely on things, though, as such tight teams, that you couldn't help but learn fast. Some really talented people worked there: Gary Gygax of course, but also Zeb Cook, Jeff Grubb, Doug Niles, Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis, Bruce Nesmith, Jim Ward, Troy Denning, Monte Cook, Larry Elmore, Keith Parkinson, Jeff Easley, Brom -- the list just goes on and on. None of us were "professional game designers" when we started out.

There were English and history teachers, a marine biologist, a puppeteer, a mathematician, a civil engineer, a Quaker minister. It was a really eclectic bunch of people. In the '80s, we were very proud of the fact that there were more full-time astronauts in the world than full-time game designers. We felt pretty elite. I worked there until the company was sold to Wizards of the Coast in 1997. I got to do just about everything involved in publishing games during those 16 years, from designing and developing to purchasing, printing, and marketing. I spent quite a few years as the creative director for AD&D. I worked on card games, board games, wargames, and tons of role-playing games. I also was the company liaison to Ral Partha for several years, which was a great position for someone like me because my contacts at RP would send me whatever I wanted from their catalog. I still have hundreds of free Ral Partha figures stacked in boxes.

Are there any projects that you are working on now that you can share?

Nothing especially secret. I just finished writing the middle section of a book on the history of D&D that should be published in 2004. I do get to play-test Avalon Hill games that are in development, like the new version of Axis & Allies that's coming out next March, but I can't talk about most of those. I also get complete sets of upcoming D&D miniatures before they're released because miniatures support on the web is one of my responsibilities. That's pretty cool.

You are the current Colonial Editor for the Courier How did you get this position and what duties does it entail'?

That was easy. Dick Bryant, the publisher of The Courier, posted a note on the Colonialwars@yahoogroups. corn forum asking if anyone was interested in the position. I've read The Courier ever since the early 80s so I volunteered. Either he was impressed by my publishing background or I was the only one to respond.

The job is fun. It entails two main duties. The first is reviewing colonial figures and rules for the magazine. I get to keep whatever I review, so what's not to like about that? I also drum up colonial- themed articles for the magazine and edit them before publication. In some cases I add material to increase the game connection, as Dick doesn't like publishing articles that are all history. For the Howard Whitehouse article on Stanley that will be in the next issue, I made the map and scrounged up the photos.

You have your own web site The Colonial Angle. Will you tell us about the site and how it came to be?

The website came about mainly because I received a digital camera for Father's Day and I wanted to learn about web programming. My wife of that time was working at a job that required her to take frequent trips. When she was out of town, in evenings after the boys had gone to bed, I'd set up miniatures battles for solo play. One night I shot photos of the game (Dhaheri's Zareba) and posted them to the Colonialwars forum. The pictures got a pretty good reception, which started the wheels turning in my head. I had recently discovered the Major General's site and Ian Croxall's Red Shadow pages. As an exercise I started reading about HTML programming and using those photos as the basis for creating a web page.

When I posted the result, people sent more encouragement, so I photographed more games. Things grew from there. It worked out pretty well, I guess, since I think that website helped me to get my current job. Unfortunately, since I started managing a website professionally, I haven't made many updates to my hobby site. I have things sifting around waiting to go up. Heaven knows when I'll get to them.

Please compare gaming in different parts of the country with what you have found in the Northwest What suggestions would you make to improve gaming in this area?

Actually, there's more miniatures gaming going on here in the NW, and at a higher quality in terms of modeling, than in the Midwest, which is the only other part of the country where I've lived (in Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin). I suppose there was more gaming going on in Milwaukee or Chicago than I saw but I lived in a small town of about 2,000 people.

One thing the Midwest had, though, was a wealth of hobby shops that stocked historical miniatures. I could drive an hour in any direction and get to Napoleon's in Milwaukee, The Emperor's Headquarters in Chicago, The Last Square in Madison, or Royal Hobby in Rockford. All of them had extensive stocks of figures to paw through. A few stores here carry historical figures but there's nothing to compare with those I left behind. Royal Hobby, for example, had about the same floor space as American Eagles on Lake City Way, and almost a third of it was devoted to miniatures. If you took all the non- Games Workshop miniatures stock from every store in the greater Seattle-Tacoma area and added it all together, you might come close to what Royal Hobby carried year round. I didn't realize how spoiled we were in southeast Wisconsin until I moved away. Maybe that's changed in the three years I've been gone.

The gaming community out here is friendly, talented, and very active. I haven't seen the juvenile bickering that poisons the atmosphere in HMGS East or, to a lesser extent, Midwest. There are public games every few weeks at American Eagles in Tacoma, you can play DBA semi- weekly at Fire and Sword, and the Game Matrix and other stores also hold events. Those things get publicized on the web through their email groups so you always know what's coming up. There are two or three good conventions every year. This region has a terrific gaming atmosphere.

What are your thoughts as to the direction that the hobby is taking? Do you see a potential for growth in the number of gamers?

I think there's never been a better time to be a miniatures wargamer. The variety and quality of what's available is tremendous. The world wide web gives everybody with a credit card or a Paypal account access to figures from all over the world. Direct sales over the internet make it possible for hobby manufacturers to operate on a small scale and still turn enough profit to stay in business. The internet also makes it possible for all the clubs and individuals to share their rules and photos of their games with everyone. The way the web ties gamers together into a community is unprecedented. When I go to a convention like Cold Wars in Pennsylvania, I know weeks or months ahead of time what games will be run, which hotels are full, what manufacturers will be selling in the dealer's hall, even who else is going to be there. I probably know many of the people through internet forums even if I've never met them personally. Whether you're a sports car enthusiast, a stamp collector, or a wargamer, the communitybuilding power of the internet is one of the coolest things to come along in decades for hobbyists like us. That's only going to get better and better. In terms of recruiting, the only thing better than having kids see a game underway is having them find websites like the Red Shadow or Major General Rederring's pages or Terragenesis. The popularity of pre-painted, collectible, plastic miniatures has to be a good sign. I think we'll get a small but steady trickle of new miniaturists making the transition from pre-painted plastic to painting their own. Not a lot, probably, but even a few is better than none.

Finally, is there any subject relating to the hobby that you would like to comment on?

For me, it's all about fellowship. I'm not competitive at all, and I don't care whether I win or lose. If everyone's having a good time and the battle is tense and interesting, that's what really matters.