I was just checking my email and came across a new web based Matrix Game that is about to commence. Jeff Grossman is going to run a War of Spanish Succession game. He has set up a web page at There is nothing real surprising about this - which is in and of itself worth note. For years games have been played on the internet. RPG text games, arcade move and shoot’em ups, and of course SimCity/Civilization. Some work great (the shoot’em ups and SimCites) while others really don’t. Matrix Games, in my opinion work great. Email is perfect for MGs because what are our games but a bunch of words. Web pages are great places to house MG write-ups because they do the printing and mailing of text and pictures - world wide - for essentially nothing. I think we’re still working out the bugs of how to play games on web pages but that will come. I’m certain of this because of the amazing dumbing down that has happened in designing web pages. I have to admit that I am a noodle brain when it comes to working computers. But I’m just young enough to have had contact with them as a teenager. I was in the computer club in High School in the late 70’s (which meant I knew how to turn the ONE computer in the school on!) All of which means I’m not frightened of them. I know they work if the programming is right. All I have to do is learn which buttons to push. For years we’ve used word processors and some of use publishing programs. But unless you could write computer code (well.. html) you couldn’t put up a web page. I decided not to bother learning this because I thought they would come up with simple page building program. Sure enough they have! Now even a noodle brain like me can go to geocities/yahoo, get a free web page and click on a button to start their page builder program. The program looks a lot like a publisher program (which is a lot like a word processor). In a day you can learn the basics and in a week know enough to put up your own pages. Which leads me to wonder - How can we use this to play Matrix Games? A number of articles in this issue seek to answer this. Back to Table of Contents -- Matrix Gamer #23 To Matrix Gamer List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2001 by Chris Engle. 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