This month we open with a really spectacular piece, namely Greg Costikyan’s carefully thought out historical essay on what happened to board wargaming. The opinions in the analysis are his, but you are reading from someone who has been highly active in the hobby for decades. We continue to search for excellent writers who can produce coherent articles that are more than a paragraph long. Much of what passes for discussion on the internet these days is incoherent, or so briefly laid out as to be unworthy of reproduction. I view myself fortunate to have found some truly excellent writers, the fine people you see represented in the following, and to have had the privilege of giving them a larger audience. If you enjoy reading Game!, please do call the attention of your other correspondents to our existence. Game! is a hobby, one that would be even better if I more or less broke even on the operation. I am not losing more than I can afford to spend, and there are compensating benefits, but your aid in telling readers about magweb.com, www.homergames.com, and www.gametableonline.com would be most appreciated. When we see those counts of articles read and downloaded and printed going up, we know that we are giving the gaming community a resource that is widely appreciated. In other notes, I recently did a count against several standard sources, and it appears that at the start of 2005 there were about 3800 board wargames of various sorts in existence. Some games were more complex than others, some games were more expensive than others, but they were all war-games, and in the foreseeable future I hope to give each games its moment in the sun. I am, I fear, a bit constrained. I am limited to the board wargames that I actually own, and it would appear that my collection is short at least 500 games, despite the vigor of my search and the concomitant profits of my suppliers. If you are a subscriber, please do renew. And if you are a writer, I am most profoundly and humbly grateful to your for your contributions to Game! Back to Table of Contents -- Game! # 14 To Game! List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2005 by George Phillies. 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