In the history of wargaming, 1982 was the worst of years. The end of SPI was a blow from which the hobby has never recovered. Now 1998 joins it in the pantheon of catastrophe. Avalon Hill is no more. The first wargaming publisher, and one known for care, thought and quality year after year, indeed decade after decade, has faded into oblivion. A line of games that goes back to the likes of Tactics and Gettysburg, with squares, ends with The Bitter Woods and For the People. I have a hard time imagining wargaming without Avalon Hill. My first game in 1972 was an Avalon Hill title, 1914, and for many years thereafter nearly every one that I bought came from the old shop in Baltimore. All along the way, they opened up whole new vistas of history, incidentally providing many, many hours of entertainment and friendly competition. The story of my involvement with wargaming is, in large part, the story of Avalon Hill Games in my life. Memories There are so many happy memories, of friendships found and forged, unlikely victories and one or two humiliating defeats. Well, they weren't happy memories at the time, but were fuel for laughter when the aftertaste of defeat had faded. There were discoveries, about history: I well remember learning about the bloodbath of World War I from 1914, realizing that each step loss was 10,000 dead, maimed and mutilated soldiers. One memory I will always associate with Avalon Hill games is smell. Nothing ever duplicated the smell of a freshly opened Avalon Hill box. Combined with the expectation of new experiences and discoveries, it promised magic. Amazingly, the games usually delivered. There are a few bittersweet memories as well. During my high school years, my late father did not approve of wargames. I remember the summer of 1978, a difficult one for me in a great many ways, and going to some nearly desperate means of getting the games. I rode my bike five miles over typical Western Pennsylvania hills, aspiring to be mountains, to get the last copy of the newly released Squad Leader from Hobby Corner in Allison Park. Then I rode five miles back, and tried to sneak it into the house. I failed, and life became even more difficult for a while. But even someone as stubborn as my father could be brought around. Within ten years, he was playtesting Platoon with me for a Fire & Movement review, and crediting my grad school grades, much better than my struggles through Shady Side Academy in 1978, to wargaming. I liked SPI, and still miss its prodigious output and spirit of innovation. I loved Avalon Hill games. There were fewer of them in any given year, but they were important productions, as shown by their mounted map-boards, a standard unique among major wargame publishers. Development and artistic values were always high, to the point that they were often easily taken for granted. There were truly crucial design breakthroughs along the way. Squad Leader and Advanced Squad Leader are the most important twentieth century tactical boardgames ever published. Period. The repackaging of prior releases from other companies were equally important as well; Battleline's old Flat Top became the standard World War II air/naval game, and PanzerGruppe Guderian and Conquistador lost nothing from their SPI versions. In fact, Conquistador was a substantially better game under the Avalon Hill imprint. The introduction of Victory Games opened up a new front for Avalon Hill, combining the company's resources with the talent of the defunct SPI. As with Squad Leader, I discovered them on the shelves of Hobby Corner. I asked the owner, who always had a TV and a cat behind the counter, if Victory Games was a new publisher. He wasn't sure, saying that the distributor had just recommended that he add a few to his order. I dug into my pocket and found just enough money to buy Vietnam. I took it home, opened the box, and found a Avalon Hill production. As well as that wonderful smell of ink and varnished counters. Like most other wargamers, I always thought that there would always be an Avalon Hill. It was a constant. The Era is Over Unfortunately, that era is over. The declining boardgame market, and the company's struggle to keep its slice of an ever-shrinking pie, were all too evident in recent years. Victory Games lost its distinctive character, then its very existence. Then Avalon Hill experienced an exodus of its best talent, losing Craig Taylor, Jim Day, Jim Rose, Charlie Kibler, and others. The Hill's losses were the gains of others, as witnessed by the success of the software publisher TalonSoft, a veritable Avalon Hill in exile. Good Company Avalon Hill made renewed ventures into computer gaming, an area of earlier disappointment. Again, this was with mixed commercial results. Had the results been better, say on a par with TalonSoft's, then perhaps nobody would be reading Avalon Hill's obituary for years to come. So Avalon Hill is now a part of wargaming's history instead of its future. It has good company, with SPI and GDW, plus many lesser companies. Where does this leave board wargaming? I'm afraid it leaves it in critical condition. For the last seven years, I've been among a small minority, with a reasonably optimistic view of wargaming's future. For the first time, I'm not so sure. The importance of Avalon Hill to the hobby and the industry cannot be underestimated. Without the company, both are profoundly weaker. If boardgaming is to be resuscitated, it will have to be built again from scratch. The end of SPI was a critical hit, resulting in damage fully was severe today as it was sixteen years ago. It is certain that Avalon Hill's passing will be every bit as bad. More than just the loss of excellent games for the future, the end of Avalon Hill is demoralizing. For myself and a great many wargamers, it is not the death of a company. It is not even the death of a friend, or even an old friend. It is more like the death of family. Wargaming is in a bad way, no doubt about it. Now, any attempt at reanimation will have to occur without the material contributions, and the comforting presence, of the premier publisher. Generally, when a company in any industry goes out of business, there is not much of an emotional blow to the market in which it operates. There are exceptions, of course; train buffs miss their particular favorite railroads, and I once met an aviation enthusiast prone to tears at the mention of Pan Am. But the except for the laid off workers, who must find a new course in life, the end of a company causes little disruption for the most part. Others supply the product, and economic life goes on. As a fundamentally creative endeavor, wargaming is an exception. Games, like books and movies, are not commodities. They have a character of their own, shared with those who design, develop, and publish them. When a wargame publisher goes out of business, a unique identity dies with it, and something is lost that can never be truly replaced. Jim's heartfelt tribute to Avalon Hill first appeared as his editorial "The Bully Pulpit" in the Fall 1998 issue of Line Of Departure 28:2-3. Back to Cry Havoc #24 Table of Contents Back to Cry Havoc List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 by David W. Tschanz. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com