1 . The time is early June, and in browsing through the MAGWEB site, there's a listing for reviews of historical games. Eight games are listed, and when I brought up the reviews to read them, I discovered that Mr. MAGWEB, Russ Lockwood, wrote seven of the reviews himself. These included: 1806, boardgame Classical Hack, miniatures Master Europa, boardgame Battle Of The Bulge, card game Charley Company, miniatures Day Of Battle, miniatures Medieval Warfare, miniatures Of interest to me is that Mr. MAGWEB apparently has never seen a set of rules he didn't like. He recommends them all. There are no 'bad' rules systems out there. He admits that the majority of them are incomplete, and the rules have holes in them, but this is papered over by his contacting the author, asking a series of questions about the gaps in the rules, and publishing the author's response following the Lockwood MAGWEB review. To me, this is somewhat similar to rules reviews that Hal Thinglum used to give in his MWAN (he may still be doing it now). Hal used to briefly glance at a set of rules (sent to him as a freebee by the author), and, without playing a game, state in very general terms, that the booklet looked great, that the systems employed appeared to be logical, that the author seemed to cover all the procedures, and that the rules set was highly recommended. Russ Lockwood at least actually plays the game using the rules. That's how he develops the questionnaire that he sends to the author. But the Lockwood reviews don't seem to take into account the fact that the author wants good money to be paid for a booklet containing a system that is neither completely nor adequately described. And while MAGWEB readers may get the benefit of the authors ideas of what it is that he wants to do, how he does it, and how he's going to correct the problems that Russ brought up, the non-MAGWEB subscriber, who hears that Russ said 'the rules are great' is out of the loop. The Simon procedure is to take the opposite tack to both Thinglum and Lockwood. I start off with the assumption that all rules are incomplete, and that the author doesn't understand the distinction between precision and accuracy in his presentation of history. I am rarely disappointed. Many, many times, I've been privileged to sit in on a game hosted by the author (or one of his disciples) of a particular published set of rules, and been extremely impressed by how smoothly the flow of the game went, and how logically the host glided from one procedure to the next. And then, after taking the rules in hand and studying them, and trying to put on a game myself, I discover that the game at which I was present differs greatly from the one spelled out in the text... familiarity with the rules system permitted the host to gloss over and paper over certain problem areas... areas that the reader of the rules must puzzle out for himself. Unfortunately, a lot of the puzzle areas remain unsolvable. Back to PW Review May 1999 Table of Contents Back to PW Review List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 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