Favrorite games characters in campaigns are topics which one always hear being discussed whenever one is at a convention in which even a few role-playing enthusiasts are gathered. More to the point, these are questions put directly to me whenever I speak to an audience at such a gathering. I've often said that I’ve never seen a game I didn't like. This is an exaggeration, of course, but not a very great one. When I was just a toddler, I got my hands on a mechanical horse racing game called GEE WHIZ. It had six horses of different color in a like number of upward-inclined tracks. Colored flags rose from a horizontal position to a vertical one when a horse reached the top of its slot. By vigorously pulling a string which was wrapped around a metal shaft, a player could make cams strike a host of little ball bearings, which in turn flew randomly into a snack and drove the horses along. One horse would always come in first. It was clearly a gambling device. There were little colored areas matching the horses' colors where wagers were placed. I played with it for hours trying to see if one color predominated. No, sorry I don't recall ever determining if there was anything other than a pretty random outcome. The point is, I liked gaming. By the time I was five, I was playing blackjack and pinochle when the adults would let me sit in. The game of checkers was OK, though I soon dropped it for chess when my father bought me my first real set for my sixth birthday. Prior to this we had been using checker pieces with the names of the chess pieces written on tape. After this came ROOK, PIT, PARCHEESI, Snakes & Ladders, and silly games like Old Maid and SLAPJACK were what I played. After all, I was a kid! Don't get me wrong. I grew up on Kenmore Avenue with a dozen chums around and there was a lot of tag, cops & robbers and fist fighting as well as board and card games. It was all in good fun. I had a big bag filled with metal toy soldiers, the 70mm type from the dime stores. I never will forget the trouble I got into when my father discovered the "neat caves" I'd patiently excavated under our sidewalk to house the men and guns. Protection from air raid, you know and bound to make sidewalks crack and break! So at eight years of age we moved to Wisconsin, and there I learned how to play CAMELOT, backgammon, Chinese checkers, FOTO ELECTRIC FOOTBALL, and did a lot of "realistic" cops & robbers-type gaming with a teenage referee who adjudicated things for us kids. We also played TOURING, MONOPOLY, and BIG BUSINESS (and about that game I'll say more later). Then I got into playing such card games as poker, canasta and stamba, a dozen kinds of solitaire, bezique, hearts, fantan, casino, and cribbage, even mah jjong. It was around this time that Don Kaye and I began to try to put some rules to the mock battles we'd have with the World War II 54mm toy soldiers, guns, and AFVs which tended to litter the floor of the attic of my house. The old dime store figures had been replaced by then with Britons, of course. From shooting ladyfinger firecrackers in the nifty cannons that were there - and breaking a lot of troops thereby - we went to coin flipping and finally a pair of dice to determine the high score. Young nephews played havoc with those figures though, so the exercise ended for a while. I was in my early teens by this time, and my buddies and I were out and about whenever the weather was half-way decent. We swam and played "shark-tag" at night, built rafts, fished, bicycled, hiked and camped, enjoyed scrimmaging in sand lot football, had snowball and BB gun fights (tamer by far than those with sling and slingshot), practiced quarter staff fighting (and go many bruises and mashed hands) - in short all manner of fun and stupid things teenage boys could do back in the early 1950s. Winters in Wisconsin are long, so on rainy days or the extremes of cold we were heavily playing card, board and table games. My favorite indoor games were ping pong, pool, poker, cribbage, bezique (six-deck rubicon rules), pinochle, BIG BUSINESS, And chess. The forty-eight state version of Milton Bradley's BIG BUSINESS game was very well balanced and made no pretensions about being serious. We played that one a lot, and not infrequently my two bed friends, Tom Keogh and Don Kaye, and I would remain fighting it out for hours, each having a "tycoonship" (manufacturing usually went to Don, oil to me, steel to Tom), and a sufficient balance of other state cards to make it anyone's game. In fact I am looking for one of those old versions of the game now, so that I can teach it to my son, Alexander. Perhaps he and some of his buddies might get as much enjoyment as we did when the January deep freeze hits. There were many bookcases full of books around, so I wasn't limited to the science fiction, fantasy, horror hard bounds, pulps, and paperback I'd been collecting and perusing since age twelve. Edgar Allen Poe, Balzac, Mark Twain, Shakespeare and all manner of histories were to be found on the shelves and I cracked them frequently. Likewise, a lot of the less serious works which had belonged to grandfathers, uncles, cousins etc, were read with great enthusiasm. I'd go through a book or two a day. One particular gem was THE BOY'S OWN BOOK. In it, I discovered the rules for Double Chess, a chess variation played on a circular board of sixteen squares in four bands, and a mention of the "many kinds of chess played in the past." That set my fiends and I to having wonderful battles on the Double Chess board I made. It also directed a lot of my gaming energies for the next seven or eight years. Dragon Chess and more recently Fidchell (see DANGEROUS JOURNEYS, EPIC OF AERTH Companion Volume) are direct results of the interest generated from that old tome located in the family library. I can still play Chinese, Korean, and Japanese (shogi) chess, Chatturanga, Timur's Chess, and the Courier Game amongst a few other variations. However, I mainly play "standard" chess or shogi which I think is the best game of the lot in general. Naturally, the scope of ability means I'm not much good at any of those games. One has to specialize and devote one's self to a singular subject to really excel. I once played Class A chess, but now its push a pawn and hope. Truthfully, if I get in more than a game or two of any kind of chess a year, I'm lucky. So on with the account. I was on my own in Chicago, and it was 1958. I was wandering around in one of my favorite Loop stores, Kroch's & Brentano's, when I came across Avalon Hill's Gettysburg board wargame. It was just published and I fell instantly in love! Home it came and soon thereafter a chum and I were spending whole nights and on into the mornings completing battles once again. Sometime around 1961 I spiffed up a college term paper on the Battle of Gettysburg - the game had inspired me to even more reading and research on the American Civil War - and sent it to the Avalon Hill General. That was my first gaming article published in a non-fanzine, "The Battle of Gettysburg, If Heth Had Gone Forward". By the mid 1960 I was back in Lake Geneva where I helped found the International Federation of Wargaming and had added postal DIPLOMACY and a lot of PBM wargaming to my busy schedule. I found that "Dippy" was fun for me only postally, and only with a great deal of humorous "press releases" to accompany moves. Alan Calhamer's game is a classic, and I long to have sufficient time to get into some postal gaming...and write those nasty and propagandistic bits again for the amusement and discomfort of my postal foes. One day Sultan Omar V (last time I played Turkey the sultan was Omar IV), J. Akbar Hooka, head of the FBI (Faithful Believers in Islam, of course), Ghengis Kohen, Levantine military mastermind of the Turkish armed forces, and all the rest will appear once more to strike terror (would you believe mirth and a little scorn maybe?) into the hearts of the foe! Continue to Fun and Games Part 2 Back to Table of Contents -- SHADIS Issue No. 9 Back to SHADIS List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1993 by Alderac Group 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