I have an extensive library of games, not as large as it once was, but nevertheless still substantial. Over the years I have let it grow like a garden of weeds, until I was finally forced reluctantly - to trim it down to manageable proportions. It's amazing what one can accumulate when every penny of disposable income is spent on (in no particular order) games, albums, and books. Of course my game collection continues to grow, but perhaps I am more selective than I once was: I don't insanely purchase everything in sight anymore. I have been through my collections and sold, swapped, and given away so much stuff that my head reels to think about it. Not for me the careful pruning of prized roses practiced by my grandfather! Instead I opt for the full-scale implementation of a scorched-earth policy, if only to be able to live in a house within which everything can be located without launching an air-sea rescue operation. All jest aside, it is safe to say that though my hands have passed many great wargames, and a vast majority of the absolute stinkers! Gaming, war and otherwise, has been with me since I was very young, and it will be with me until I am incapable of moving a token around a board, rolling a die, or calculating the proper odds for an old-fashioned "soak-off" attack. Like books, or vinyl LP's, games have a way of marking periods in my life, reminding me of the people with whom I shared experiences. There are cherished favorite games to which I will always return; there are those that have been played only once or twice but possess enormous potential if I can ever find the time to play them; and there are those which I just take off the shelves once in a blue moon to admire, because my real world space constraints prevent me from actually playing them. This is not a lament for the passing of youth and the vast amount of free time that was available to put into playing games. It is instead the preamble to a call to arms aimed at every reader of CounterAttack. How many of us have games which we are not playing? How many of us are just sitting on the side-line of our hobby, wondering what it will do for us, instead of what we might possibly be able to do for it; if we got up from watching ESPN long enough to go hunt for new opponents? I'm as guilty of this as the next gamer. It applies not just to gaming, but to writing my relatives around the world, making phone calls to generate new consultancy clients for my software company, or doing the laundry today instead of when I finally run out of clean socks. It's called many things, because inertia is merely the family name of a host of demons; procrastination, lack of ambition, fear of rejection, laziness, amongst countless others. Pick your own label for the problem; one is as serious as any other. The bottom line is this: So often in life we talk ourselves out of taking action, because the path of least resistance will inconvenience us less than if we actually do something. If we, the members of the CounterAttack family, are concerned about our hobby as a social, rather than solitaire, activity, then we must take a proactive stance towards it, and do something to promote it. When I was very young I read a book about a boy who owned a collection of exquisitely painted toy-soldiers. He had inherited them from his father, and would play with them for hours on end, inventing rules to cover their movement and combat capabilities. These toy-soldiers were his friends, since he was a child bereft of play-mates; they were his pride and joy. As he grew older, he was sent off to school, where he eventually made friends with other children, and stopped playing with his toy-soldiers. At some point in time he had become ashamed of his hobby -- somebody had said something negative -- and had determined that "playing with soldiers" was for immature children. The collection of toy soldiers sat unused for several years, until everyone in his class was required to do something artistic for a project. The boy did not know what to do. He had no special artistic skills, although he had developed an interest in building models out of paper-mache. He had a weekend to decide what to do. It was during that weekend that his family had a neighbor's daughter over to a formal tea (complete with scones, Devonshire cream, strawberry jam, etc!) and the boy was pretty keen to impress her. She was in his class at school, and hadn't yet made up her mind as to what she wanted to do for the project. While showing the girl around the house, the boy came upon the glass-fronted cabinet which contained the toy-soldiers. He tried to hurry by these relics of his younger days, but she asked to see them, so he opened up the case, albeit reluctantly. The boys perception of the set of toy soldiers had blocked out of his mind the fact that he possessed beautifully crafted, beautifully painted pieces of art. As they examined several of the pieces, the boy sheepishly confessed to having staged elaborate battles with these toy-soldiers when he was younger. The girl asked him why he no longer did so, and he explained about not wishing to seem immature to his schoolmates. The girl -- who was obviously smarter than my hero -- suggested that there were probably plenty of students who would love to play with his toy-soldiers, if he would only tell them about his secret possessions. She even went so far as to say that, if he was interested, they could both work together on a diorama using the toy-soldiers. This would be a perfect class project. After the boy got over his fear of what others might think of him, he went along with the girl's plan. They made several houses and some rolling countryside out of paper-mache, painted everything to look like a village surrounded by fields and trees, and set up a diorama featuring the long-forgotten toy-soldiers. To make a long story short, their project was a success, in more ways than one. The girl was correct in her assessment of the response to the toy-soldiers. There were several other classmates who wanted to play with them, and would have done so sooner if they had known about the boy's beautiful collection of toy- soldiers. My hero discovered that he had no reason to feel embarrassed about his hobby. The only foolish thing that he had done was to never share this with anyone else. Which brings us back full circle to my call to arms, trumpeted loudly for every Joe Wargamer to hear. Nothing major is required, just a few hours research, a few hours of recce, and a few hours of direct action. The best thing that we can, individually, do for our hobby is to - gasp - share it with another human being. I'm sure my computers are all eternally grateful that I introduced them to the thrills of NFL Challenge, Second Front, etc., but beating them (or occasionally ahem - losing to them) is a vicarious thrill which pales in comparison to a hard-won contest against a flesh-and-blood opponent. It matters little where we struggle - tabletop, map-board, or computer screen - for when a live opponent is in front of me, I go for broke, even if it is just tiddlywinks we're playing. Here's what I'd like each of you to do, if you truly want to be an active member of our hobby. Draw up a list of everyone you know who has ever expressed an interest in, or an observation about, history. Label this the "A" group, because an interest in history is a latent virus waiting to spring into a desire to "do" history. Then draw up a second list of everyone you know who is heavily into sports. If you have a friend with season tickets for a team, or who is in a fantasy spots league, you have a good candidate for this, the "B" team. Finally, draw up a list of all the fairly smart, and fairly competitive people you know. Label this the "C" team. Don't leave a name off one list because it is already on one of the others. If someone crops up on two or three lists, it is a very good thing indeed; these names should be highlighted, because you have identified a high-quality potential recruit! This is the first part of the background planning stage for our operation. The second part requires that you put the current phone number of each of these persons on the list alongside their names. Contrary to our secret wishes, potential "gamers" are not likely to barrage us with requests to be allowed into the hobby. You must be prepared to take the offensive! This is the third part of the operation; it begins when you telephone these people with the express purpose of leading them into playing a game with you. When each of us is gone, it will take six friends to act as pallbearers. At the risk of seeming crass in using such an analogy, I suggest that we can each come up with six names and phone numbers of individuals who a) like history, or b) like sports, or c) are smart and competitive. Whether these friends will be around to carry one's coffin or not is not germane to our current plans. However, I'd like to point out that a failure to muster six names might have some serious implications at a future date. I can just see them now, cursing Mike Bennighof for only sharing his brilliant new game design with five people on the planet! A Monty Python funeral rears its ugly head... Let us be like Yaweh and take six days to do some work: call one pall-bearer a day between Monday and Saturday. On the seventh we can rest, and not miss any NFL action! You will need to determine the best approach for each name on your lists, but a little common sense in your initial phone calls will go a long way. For example: if your buddy is a Raiders fan, then use one of the football games as bait. I don't mean Nintendo football, though if your target is eight years old it too might serve a useful purpose. Have you recently played any of those excellent Sports Illustrated games? They make a great introduction to "gaming". And if your friend never progresses to wargames? So what? Play Paydirt once a month with him for the rest of your life. If he never begs for the chance to play the Plot to Assassinate Hitler or Spanish Armada (first edition) it doesn't matter. If he does ask, then carefully steer him to something else. Perhaps one of our compact, playable, yet eminently satisfying Just Plain Wargames might do the trick. It could happen! Let's consider another scenario: the smart, competitive individual who may or may not have an interest in things military. Railroad games are perfect for snagging this category of person. Pick up a copy of Rail Baron, Empire Builder, or 1830 and go to work. Simple multi-player games that are easy to learn, but not simple-minded, are fabulous for bringing people together in the spirit of having fun. And if your smart, competitive friend never wants to learn how to play Kriegspiel or Pearl Harbor (first edition)? So what? Play Circus Maximus or Kingmaker twice a month with a revolving group of people. You host and provide the pizza; they show up, bring something to drink, and play. You'll be surprised how quickly one of these people will ask about some of the other multi-player games in your collection. Having them displayed on a bookshelf for all to see might be a clever ploy (it has worked for me and may do so again in the future). You may even find that someone offers to host a session and foot the bill for pizza. When that happens, they are probably hooked. When the time seems right, you can introduce them to Spies or junta as a conduit to military multi-player games. Our history lovers are relatively easy to ensnare: just discover what hot-button will set them off. If it's the American Civil War, lead them to A House Divided via a discussion of the recent PBS television series. If it's WWII in the Pacific, then lead them to Victory in the Pacific via a discussion of the revisionist history books dealing with the events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Use your imagination to find the key to unlock the door! Remember to let your opponent win a few early on. Be subtle about it when you throw a game, because nobody likes to be patronized. If you desire long-term opponents for any game, treat it like an investment, and let it mature. Don't - no matter how great the temptation - blast a novice to smithereens right out of the gate. It may be bad for business! Don't be inert where our challenging hobby is concerned. I know that most of us don't have the time to devote to wargaming that we would wish to have. If we extend the parameters of what we are willing to play, and make an effort to find players for games which have the appearance of being mainstream -- even if they really aren't -- we may come to find some who will come to enjoy wargames as an adjunct to sophisticated sports and family games. And what if none of these people elect to play wargames. Does it really matter one bit? You will have made the effort to broaden the membership base of our hobby. You may make a new friend of a casual acquaintance. You may broaden someone's knowledge. You might discover a game that you have ignored because of its "simplicity" or subject matter is actually a lot of fun to play. You might learn a thing or two yourself. Finally (he says, reeling in the fish) you might even meet someone of the opposite sex through gaming. Stranger things have happened! Nobody has to do any of this if they don't want to. If you have all the opponents that you can handle for the games that you are playing, then maybe none of this applies to you. But, if you've got games that aren't being played - for whatever reason - maybe some fresh blood is the answer. When all is said and done, this call to arms may be nothing more than the fading trumpets of a fast-retreating army. I prefer to think that we are only now beginning the advance. I don't want to see us, old and withered, with our toy soldiers permanently retired to the garage, because we never made the effort to find out if one person in our life, who didn't know about our hobby, wanted to play with our toys but never got the chance. Back to Table of Contents: CounterAttack # 4 To CounterAttack List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1993 by Pacific Rim Publishing Company. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com