This column is available to anyone who has an interesting argument, whether or not the editor agrees with it. Think of it as a longer-than-usual letter to the editor. Since this is the first issue, the editor will get the ball rolling.

To most board wargame collectors, the sine qua non would be the unpunched game, complete and in mint condition. Anything less would be suspect, particularly since there is no single reference available which provides a detailed and definitive manifest of game components.

Some game companies such as SPI made a habit of listing the components of their games, usually in rules section [3.0] Game Equipment, but these listings were not exhaustive. Knowing that a game came with one sheet of counters, for example, is not of much use unless you also knew that the company's standard counter sheet was 200 counters, or 192, or whatever. Even then, there was little consistency among the games from one company, much less among several companies.

And knowing that a particular game came with, say, 400 counters may be less help than it appears at first. Very few games came with a counter manifest - SPI did this on occasion, such as with the Great Medieval Battles quadrigame and the Campaign for North Africa, but there unfortunately appeared to be no rhyme nor reason to the games chosen for this treatment. So, of those 400 counters, how many were blanks? This is critical knowledge because if, say, 14, were blank counters, then technically only 386 counters were required to play the game, and the game could therefore technically be described as "complete".

Looked at another way, if your new acquisition is supposed to have 800 counters but you have counted only 777, were the missing 23 all blanks? Were there actually only 19 (or 18 or 17) blanks and you're missing four (or five or six) unknown counters? Did you miscount and perhaps should count again? To a collector, this is important information which will affect the ultimate game value.

Another complication has to do with whether the game's counters are all different and unique, or whether there are many generic, cookie-cutter counters. In the former instance, a few missing counters could be debilitating to the game, whereas in the latter instance, having only 14 of the 15 2-2-4 infantry units may not even be noticed.

But how unpunched is unpunched and how complete is complete?

An argument could be made that the Holy Grail should be the shrinkwrapped game, but there are a number of real and potential problems with a shrinkwrapped game Oust as there were with the Holy .Hand Grenade of Antioch). The most obvious one is, how can a collector verify that the game's component manifest is complete and the components are in mint condition, without disturbing the shrinkwrap (unless one is in possession of one's own shrinkwrapping machine, which solves the practical problem but creates a moral one).

There is the classic example of an older SPI game, one involving Patton if I remember correctly, which was distributed directly from the factory (in shrinkwrap of course) without a map. One can only wonder how many collectors have a shrinkwrapped copy of this game, and how many of these copies have no map.

Then there is the practical problem that shrinkwrapping was a phenomenon of the 1970's, so that games produced earlier than this simply were not shrinkwrapped when distributed. How can a collector verify whether a particular game, which was distributed about this time, was available in shrinkwrap or not? And is this, information really important?

Another problem with a shrinkwrapped game is the inability to slip the box ever so lightly apart, to gently unfold the map and expose it in all its glory, to carefully part the covers of the rulebook and slowly ease open each page with a searching fingertip, to lovingly caress the components, to absorb the beauty and breathe in the purer air of an earlier age. Not to mention the need to carelessly split a few infinitives .

But the principle of the shrinkwrapped game suggests that a complete game (for a collector at least) must include every scrap of paper and bit of plastic that was originally packaged with the game when it left the factory. Most Internet auctioneers use the word "complete", in describing the games they auction, in the sense that they contain all of the components necessary to play the game. These games may not contain any of the advertising material, catalogs, response cards or other ephemera which many games came with. They may not contain errata or counter trays, even when they were originally packaged with the game. And in some instances they may not contain dice, on the grounds, no doubt, that everybody should be able to find at least one die somewhere in the house.

The fundamental assumption is that every copy of a particular edition of a particular game left the factory in exactly the same state with exactly the same number of discrete pieces in it. This assumption is erroneous, even for the very big companies. Not all companies took the lead of the book industry and identified separate print runs or editions of a game, much less dated them. But then, a game is inherently quite different from a book.

There are at least four basic and discrete components which must be collated in a game: a map, a rulebook, a set of counters, and some kind of container. If there are variations in any one of these, how are they dealt with by collectors? For example, there are two quite distinct states of Avalon Hill's Dune box cover art; there are rumors of at least two different box colors for SPI's Empires of the Middle Ages; and Metagaming's Stalin's Tanks microgame came in a red box which originally included a die in the list of components printed on the back, but had this word crossed out later when, presumably, a die was not included after all.

Describing a game as punched or -cut versus unpunched or uncut is only slightly less difficult. Is there such a thing as partially unpunched? In fact, it should be possible to identify a precise numerical value for the percentage of counters unpunched. But what about those unfortunate circumstances where the diecutting process has so badly warped a countersheet that one or more rows of counters fall out of the countersheet in strips, of their own accord? Can these legitimately be called unpunched? I think not: clearly and unfortunately, the counter- sheet is no longer completely intact. Some allowance should be made for this in evaluating the game, but there is also no such thing as being partially pregnant.

Two broad issues have been raised so far:

1.) how to go about obtaining a definitive component manifest for a game; and

2.) how to accurately and consistently describe the state of a game with respect to: completeness, and whether or not the counters are punched.

These two issues represent major foci for Simulacrum right now, and will be discussed in considerably greater depth and detail for the foreseeable future.