In his Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce provided the following definitions:

Accord, n. Harmony. Accordion, n. An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.

The succinctness and sarcasm are beautiful to behold, and I had hoped that he may have had similar thoughts on editors. He had other ideas:

Editor, n. A person who combines the judicial functions of Minos, Rhadamanthus and Aeacus, but is placable with an obolus; a severely virtuous censor, but so charitable withal that he tolerates the virtues of others and the vices of himself; who flings about him the splintering lightning and sturdy thunders of admonition till he resembles a bunch of firecrackers petulantly uttering its mind at the tail of a dog; then- straightway murmurs a mild, melodious lay, soft as the cooing of a donkey intoning its prayer to the evening star. Master of mysteries and lord of law, high-pinnacled upon the throne of thought, his face suffused with the dim splendors of the Transfiguration, his legs intertwisted and his tongue a-cheek, the editor spills his will along the paper and cuts it off in lengths to suit. And at intervals from behind the veil of the temple is heard the voice of the foreman demanding three inches of wit and six lines of religious meditation, or bidding him turn off the wisdom and whack up some pathos.

It is no longer fun when you need footnotes as extensive as for T.S. Eliot in college texts. Who are these three, anyway: Minos, Rhadarnanthus and Aeacus? Well, it turns out that they are brothers, sons of Zeus (the god of all the gods, known as Jupiter by the Romans and Dunnigan by the grognards) and Europa (the goddess of monster games). Minos was the king of Crete who fed young Athenians t'o his Minotaur, thus becoming the patron saint of parents of teenagers. Rhadamanthus was a ruler and judge in Elysium, a special place beloved of Beethoven and Gygax. And Aeacus was leader of the Myrmidons, loyal followers who executed orders unquestioningly and pitilessly, and were always represented by black counters with white lettering.

This little foray into the classics is obviously getting us nowhere, so I suspect that I will have to go it alone the rest of the way. On the other hand, those of you who are not familiar with my style by now (ie., anyone who has not been a member of the Strategy Gaming Society in the last two years) should be developing a pretty good sense of what it will be like wandering around board wargames with me. A pretty good sense, or else a growing unease.

For those who are wondering why I am doing this, there are many reasons, none of which was sufficient on its own but more than adequate when taken together. After editing the Strategy Gaming Society's monthly newsletter Strategist for two years, I found that I enjoyed, and have an aptitude for editing, but not for publishing every month. As a grognard I find myself enjoying the play of a game more when I better understand some of the history that surrounds it, its designer and its publisher.

As an antiquarian (relatively speaking) board wargame dealer, I have amassed knowledge and some very handy references which should be made available to others who are interested. As a financial analyst I see an available market niche, arising from baby boomers who are now returning to their gaming roots but are not being supported to any great or unified extent by the existing journals and magazines. Paper Wars, the David to the established Goliaths of Command and S&T and The General and Moves and Fire & Movement, may yet return, but not likely as the magazine that Rich Erwin began: The Wargame Collector's Journal. And finally, the time is right - we are still well within two generations of the golden age of board wargames, but the grognards are getting older and the memories are getting dimmer. The information must be set down quickly, before it is lost.

The decision to fly in the face of modern technology, the Intemet and the World Wide Web was made intentionally after considerable deliberation. Simulacrum will be first and foremost a paper product. This is in keeping with the general, aim and direction (goals, objectives and mission statements notwithstanding) of creating a detailed and complete record of all of the information available for each board wargame dealt with. The Internet has not yet demonstrated the robustness and achieved the universal accessibility required for it to be considered a reliable and worthy archive.

On the other hand, I'm definitely not a Luddite. Editing and publishing have been significantly simplified by computer technology in the past ten years. In my early experiences with newspapers, I never had to work with hot type, but I did have the pleasure of extensively using the cut-and-paste technique; I have embraced desktop publishing wholeheartedly. And I hope to be able to complete arrangements for having Simulacrum made available on the Internet, on MagWeb and/or WebGrognards, in due course.

Furthermore, if you consider yourself to be a serious and active board wargame collector, then you must have your own computer and access to the Intemet. Without it, you are dooming yourself to remaining an amateur on the periphery of the real action, and you are probably paying too much for the games you buy. I cannot make this point too forcefully. There is no room for the Luddite; this is true now for any avocation involving collectible objects having some value. To quote Professor Peter Schickele in a lecture on P.D.Q. Bach: "Truth is just truth - you can't have opinions about it."

Admittedly, you must sell a small part of your soul when you buy a computer, a modem, a communications package and time on an Internet Service Provider such as America on Line (AOL). The fact is, you are not so much selling a part of your soul as you are mechanizing it.

Computers have soul. In fact, all inanimate objects have soul, which is why it's important never to let them know when you're in a hurry. The sooner you learn that computers are not simply bits of metal and wire designed to obey your every whim, the sooner you and your computer will become productive members of the Internet community and be able to contribute to universal knowledge, understanding and the occasional flame war. The cost of a reasonable computer system is not insignificant either, but a workable, if not quite cutting-edge, system should be available for under $1,000. And you can amortize the expense over several years.

The Internet phenomenon is arguably one of the purest forms of the free market, and is certainly one of the most all-encompassing forms. Before the advent of the Internet, acquiring a collectible game was either an entirely accidental process or it was exceedingly deliberate - you either ran into something you wanted . quite unexpectedly, or you planned for months in advance to attend a sale or auction at a convention. This was a seller's market, and the buyer had little recourse as to the price of the item. The Internet has brought together countless buyers and sellers in very close spatial and temporal proximity. Buyers now can go comparison shopping for the most favorable price, and the plethora of sellers means that most titles are regularly available, at prices which are generally lower than five years ago.

A specific case in point is The Campaign for North Africa from SPI. Five years ago, an unpunched copy would sell for $250 on the Internet, when it was available. However, recently copies have been selling for 'as little as $100. SPI's The Conquerors sold for $125 five years ago, but copies are now available for about $60. I suspect, though, that these are different phenomena.

You've got to work hard in order to set the game up so that your output is interesting. You've got to set up strategies ... there are certain things you can do that would be obvious and quite predictable, but when you start getting into the fields of Probability and statistics you can't guess what is going on, and it is rather difficult to set up a sophisticated game.
--Charles Csuri in an interview, 1968

The Campaign for North Africa is likely to be collectible because of its sheer brute size and its reputation as one of the first monster games. Everybody has heard about this game, and many collectors (who are otherwise quite sane) want it just so they can say that they had a copy. But the game is quite unplayable, which may explain why there are so many unpunched copies available. And the fact that there are so many copies available now has driven the price down.

On the other hand, The Conquerors was a reasonably big game (although not of monster proportions) on an interesting and uncommon subject, which few people had heard about, and which was reasonably uncommon. A very good case could be made for the fact that The Conquerors is actually worth $125; unfortunately, it's not as well known as The Campaign for North Africa, so it doesn't attract attention on Internet auctions and its price remains depressed.

In fact, the impact of the Internet on the prices (as opposed to the intrinsic values) of collectible board wargames is quite amazing. Milton-Bradley's Shogun, long out of print, would sell for between $150 and $250. Now this is arguably one of their better recent games, offering relative equality for all players, significant variation from one game to the next, and thus high replayability. Yet $250 was still a staggering price to pay for what is basically a nice bit of fluff. When Milton Bradley reissued Shogun (the name changed to Samurai Swords but everything else remained the same) exclusively for Toys-R-Us, the Internet price for Shogun dropped to well under $50, at about the same level as was being charged for Samurai Swords. The market for Shogun may have been based primarily on a desire to play the game, and was probably not hurt by the fact that people could play Shogun without significantly affecting its resale value, since there were no counters to punch out.

The Internet no longer does sellers and auctioneers any favors. With so much activity and so many games available, there is a marginal difference between what buyers are prepared to pay for a game and what sellers can expect to get for it. This may not be of consequence to the private individual who is selling or auctioning a few of his games to reduce his own collection, and does not have any overhead or inventory to eat into his profit margin.

But the professional seller who does this for a living may not be able to make a reasonable rate of return.

Why is this a problem? Well, once all of the private individuals, who want to, have culled or sold off their collections, that source of supply will no longer be available. The only major source will once more be the professional sellers. If they retain their stores, then they'll likely not sell very much on the Internet, or their prices will be high. If they want to compete on the Internet, then they'll have to change the way they do business and divest themselves of their stores. It will be interesting to see what happens.

This has been an unusually long-winded bit of editorializing. I think that what I'm really doing is making up for the lack of Letters to the Editor in this first edition by planting seeds for future discussions (I briefly considered cooking up some letters, but that's not my style).

This is the computer-generated result of an early 1960's game called Random war by Charles Csuri and J. Shaffer, programmer. The program randomly determines the distribution and position of each soldier, which ones died and which were wounded. Although more variables could be introduced, which would appear to increase complexity and running time, the computer could still predict the outcome and consequences hours ahead of the program ending.