1. It hadda happen sooner or later. The May, 2000 (#152) issue of WARGAMES ILLUSTRATED contained an article by a fella named Ray Lucas, which harped on the fact that there are now lots of little casualty figures around, and that ... it has now become fashionable... to strew the playing area with prone figures to represent casualties. Ray expresses a ... certain distaste for seeing the slain and mutilated depicted on the wargames table... If we start introducing ontable casualties as a permanent feature of the game, aren't we in danger of laying ourselves open to the charge of insensitivity? More importantly, are we representing ourselves as responsible historical gamers, interested in strategy and tactics, or as slightly sick adolescents whom no one can take seriously? What's interesting to me is that the author sees no problem with wargaming itself, and that when I toss my die during the combat sequence, I can kill... let me repeat that... kill!... a certain number of little people. Omigawd! What's to become of us? All this, of course, is a quasi-argument for not removing figures at all during a battle... a unit remains on the table as a whole, until your secret markings on its data sheet indicate that it has had enough and all of its little people are removed as a group. 2. Statistics, statistics. I received the on-line MAGWEB statistics for the first quarter of 2000... January, February and March. Of the 70 or so magazines listed on the site, the PW REVIEW came in fifth in the "popularity" contest, i.e., the number of hits generated by each magazine. By some fluke or other, we just eased ahead of LONE WARRIOR, the sixth place winner. The REVIEW is still outclassed by the COURIER (22,988 hits as compared to 8,257 for the REVIEW), and MWAN (10,919 hits), and, let's face it, we'll never make the big-time. Most of the time, there's a huge transient interest in a site when the MAGWEB staff lists the new inputs received from the magazines. For example, here are the numbers for the COURIER, MWAN and the REVIEW. Magazine January February March COURIER 5700 10156 7132 MWAN 3408 3750 3761 REVIEW 5294 1358 1605 Note that interest in the COURIER zipped way up in February, when a new issue must have been posted. And note that in January, interest in the REVIEW, the result of a number of new listings, was about 4 times that in February and March. The MWAN ratings stayed rock-steady throughout the period... I assume no new listings were posted. Of interest to me is that after January (when the REVIEW hit its high of 5294) the number of subsequent hits on our site subsided to well below 2000... that seems to be the norm for the REVIEW. Only by offering the public new material can we continue to keep up the interest. I also noted that at the bottom of the MAGWEB pile were listed all the role-playing and fantasy magazines... for example, the publications called SHADIS PRESENTS and GAME NEWS had 81 and 120 hits, respectively, for the three month reporting period. They finished last and next-to-last. I think that both of these magazines deal with role playing... I have no sympathy for them. Every month, I try to sample every one of the 70 magazines on the list, looking for gaming ploys and other items and systems I can 'borrow' for my miniatures games. Two of the most fruitful sites are PERFIDIOUS ALBION and BERG'S BOARDGAME REVIEWS. Both of these magazines deal with board-games, and both have detailed reviews of the current games on the market. The reviewers go into great detail concerning the games, and are extremely critical (not only of the games, but of each other), and the articles are extremely informative. 3. Around the beginning of the year, four of us started an e-mail WW 11 campaign, the rules of which were generated by Don Bailey. The thought was to play each battle solo, and compare notes. Interest at first was rather high... when I visited Bob Hurst in Texas in March, we managed to get a couple of battles under our belt. The basic problem seemed to be that the German commanders, Don and Mike McVeigh, were working stiffs, whereas Bob and 1, as the Allied commanders, are old, get- up-late-in-the-morning, retired people, hence could devote more time to the campaign effort. I tried to get Don and Mike to each take a couple of weeks off to get the campaign going, but they never did get their priorities straight. Something about feeding their families and paying the mortgage. And so, another campaign effort went down the drain. This must be the four hundred and lebendy lebenth campaign in which I've engaged that foozled. But this won't stop me. Even as I write, yet another campaign background is being generated in my word processor. Back to PW Review March 2000 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 Wally Simon 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