As gamers age, the demands on their time increase. First they get married, usually to a spouse who regards their hobby as something between an amusing little quirk and a mild social disease. Hardly any gamers actually end up getting divorced (except Advanced Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts, most of whom have other personality deficits), but the married gamer finds it harder and harder to schedule those 15-hour sessions of Scorched Earth, or those raucous evenings of Diplomacy.

With games that require more than two players, the difficulty of scheduling increases exponentially. And then comes... CHILDREN! Suddenly your life is not your own. You don't get enough sleep. Your gaming time is now cut down to the 45 minutes between putting the kids to bed and the 11:00 news. Your meticulous plan for that air drop on Leningrad has apple sauce all over it. When you do get a day off, your spouse wants to be taken out, not wait around while you figure out how to breach the British line at El Alamein.

The traditional answer to time and scheduling problems has been the mail game: set it up, mail it off, wait for the reply, and repeat. But mail is slow. You lose track of that brilliant masterstroke you were going to inflict. You find that your opponent has based his entire move on the premise that your panzer division was in 2345, instead of 2435.

And mail games take too long. Kids can grow from the gurgling stage to the "Me play too!" stage in the time that it takes to play an Europa game by mail. And once they start walking, look out for your Europa map! A computer/modem arrangement will change all of this, and you may even have the unit positions saved in the machine, so that you no longer even need the map, except as a reference. Hands up, everyone who has such a system. Well, all of you wealthy overachievers can stop reading at this point, since the rest of this article is not for you.

Fax

I first became aware of the possibilities of the FAX machine when involved in the ETO Scorched Earth mail game. It is expensive if you have to pay for it, but in my experience very few gamers cannot get the occasional use of one for free. Remember that phone lines are cheaper outside of office hours, and that you can use the time zones to your advantage.

For example, a FAX sent from your office on the East coast after 6:00 PM will arrive on the West coast before your opponent goes home for dinner. He can write up his move and FAX it back before 8:00 AM the next morning, so that you can peruse it over lunch. The turn-around time is thus very short, as long as your employer will tolerate such use of the company FAX.

But a FAX is really just a telephone mated to a photocopier. Why not just use a phone directly, and game in real time? You wouldn't want to do this with a long-distance opponent, but for gamers in the local dialing area it is ideal. First of all, buy a phone headset. You know, one of those gadgets you see in the mail-order TV ads: "Our operators are standing by..."

The typical unit includes a splitter so that your headset and regular phone can use the same outlet. The cheaper form of headset ($20-$30) cannot be used to dial out on its own, but will have reasonable sound quality and should include a long cord so that you can move around quite a bit.

So, set up your move, put on the headset, dial your opponent, switch on the headset, and make your move. Moves can be done continuously, or you can ring off to plan your response. Both hands are free to move units, write down positions, or whatever. I have the headset cord attached to the ceiling above my gaming table, and from there it will stretch about ten feet, which is more than enough to check out those stacks at the far end of the map. A real plus is the roleplaying you can do with one of these things: "Blue Leader, this is Red Dog 2!" You get the idea.

Playing by phone is ideal for games with partial intelligence (in the game system, not the players). If units would not be visible to your opponent, don't tell him about them. Pacific War works very well, and any Europa game using partial intelligence home rules would be easier by phone than by any other system. As for kids, well, a phone game can be halted at any point, to be restarted later. If your toddler does tap dance on the map, your opponent will have his map-board available to reconstruct yours.

I would be interested in hearing from anyone else who has tried gaming by phone: what games have you tried, how do you handle combat, etc. I suppose I haven't really addressed the problems with which I opened this article, but consider the following TRUE story: one weekend in the recent past, which was the date set for an eight-player Civilization match, saw the largest one-day's dump of snow for these parts in nearly a quarter century.

All of the anxious gamers had negotiated with their spouses for a day devoted to the gentle art of humiliating their friends, and now found themselves with no way short of snowmobile of getting together. If a phone game had been planned as an alternative, the day would not have been lost. Instead of housework, I could have been leading panzers, or commanding legions, or sailing with the fleet. I love the smell of cardboard in the morning...