John Kula. Not exactly as illustrated.

Favorite game Illuminati (Steve Jackson Games)
Favorite board game Samurai Swords, née Shogun (Milton-Bradley) with house rules
Favorite war game Operation Crusader (Atomic via Avalon Hill) via email
Favorite board wargame Rommel in the Desert (Columbia Games) on odd days, Beda Fomm (GDW) on even days and Operation Crusader (GDW) on February 29 th s.
Favorite era North Africa during WW2, else Ancients
Favorite publisher GDW

In retrospect, I envied grognards who cut their teeth on Blitzkrieg, Tactics II or Afrika Korps. My first board wargame, bought in 1969, was Avalon Hill’s 1914. When I recovered consciousness a few years later, I tried again with SPI’s introductory game Napoleon at Waterloo, and I never looked back again except when TSR cancelled my lifetime sub-scription to S&T.

In most respects I’m an average grognard: I was born in 1947 on the leading edge of the baby boomer generation; I was in the military for three years, first with the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry and then with the Canadian Army (Reg) Armoured (sic) Corps; I have one degree in science and another in architecture; and I’m a mid-level bureaucrat in the British Columbia provincial government. In other respects, I’m quite non-average: I’m a motorcyclist favoring old British idiosyncratic characters to modern Japanese carbon-fiber copies; I have a partner who indulges and encourages my exoticism; I belong to the Strategy Gaming Society; and I can successfully divide by zero; that kind of thing. But I digress.

The 1970’s were, for me, The Happy Times. As a single university student, I had lots of opportunity to play games ’til four in the morning, and took every one. I also had lots of disposable income, and the many new games being published were all reasonably priced. I remember working one Christmas in my friend’s game store, not for salary (I didn’t really need the money) but for the opportunity to indulge my craving at greatly reduced prices. Two copies of GDW’s Operation Crusader had just arrived in the store, and I actually thought twice before buying one of them. $29.95 seemed like such an enormous price for a game back then, even a game with 2,400 counters and five large maps.

One incident occurred during that time that made it into the local newspaper, much to my chagrin. As I remember it, I arrived at my friend Mike’s house one Saturday morning about nine, hoping to get into a game of something, but he was already just starting a game of Regatta (the Avalon Hill version) with another old friend, Dave. This was their first attempt to play it and, like me, they had no experience with the intricacies of real sailboat racing to help understand the very skimpy rules of the game. So they had agreed to a set of principles to guide them where the rules were silent, when I arrived. Dave wanted me to join in, but Mike expressed some concern about me not being party to their agreement, and thus liable to question their decisions and start the arguments all over again. Dave won out and so the game began. It didn’t take long for our boats to get to the first turning point, and for me to attempt a maneuver that Mike immediately pointed out transgressed one of their rule interpretations.

Since I didn’t understand their interpretation, and didn’t want to make the same mistake again, I asked them what principle their interpretation was based on. And that’s when Mike went ballistic. He started ranting and raving, and wouldn’t stop. “I knew it! I told you this would happen!” he yelled, pacing around the room, flapping his hands in agitation.

Now let’s stop for a moment and put things into perspective. I am 6’-5” tall and, as they are wont to say to my face, big-boned. Mike was only an inch or so shorter, but he was much lankier. Mike had a quick temper, but he was normally a very gentle and taciturn person. He and I had been friends for years, and we had gamed together incessantly to that point. Anyway, he started throwing a tantrum like I’d never seen before, and I was trying to get him to settle down for just a moment. He didn’t, and I finally snapped. I jumped up from the table, stormed across the 15 feet that separated us, and roared at him to shut up, but in more words. I must have intimidated him because he stopped shouting, but he also pushed me away in a quick move that caught me by surprise.

As I fell back onto the couch, I instinctively clutched his arm. I fell on the couch and Mike fell on top of me and accidentally kneed me in the groin. I took a swing at his head, which was no longer there, and hit the wall instead. Nevertheless, he has not spoken to me since.

In 1979 I discovered the existence of a Canadian game company, Simulations Canada. I contacted Steve Newberg and made him an offer of a free cover design for any game of his choosing, appealing all the while to his nationalism and sense of balance of trade (in the mistaken belief that he, too, was Canadian). We agreed on Inchon, but Steve preferred Rodger MacGowan’s version (as did I, to tell the truth), and so Steve got me to modify my design slightly, and it became the cover for the 2nd edition of Dieppe. That was the beginning of a ten-year working relationship wherein I did the cover art for all of SimCan’s games. I finally had to stop when my eyesight deteriorated and I could no longer do detailed work. Amazingly, I’ve never met Steve face to face, but we’re still friends and in contact, and he hopes to move out to British Columbia some day soon.

I have been fascinated by computers since my first encounter with them at university in 1969. As soon as I could afford it, I bought my own: an Ohio Scientific C1P with 4K of RAM, expan-dable to 8K on board. It was very similar, in operation if not in quality, to the Apple of the time, with a 6502 processor and 12K BASIC in ROM, but cost only $400 compared with $2,000 for an Apple or a TRS-80. This artifact was eventually replaced by a Commodore 64, on which I designed and programmed a game on the entire North Africa campaign from the Italian advance on Egypt in 1940 to the end of the DAK in Tunis in 1943. Sim-Can sold enough copies of Sieg in Afrika that I realized just over $500 in royalties. But my day job was still safe.

In the early 1990’s, wargame collecting was in its infancy, and it was possible to acquire games cheaply and flip them for considerably more, a practice, I might add, of which I have hearsay evidence only. This phenomenon was aided and abetted when eBay came on the scene, collecting became accessible to the general public, and old grognards got rid of their kids and wanted back in to the hobby. I spent five years trading games and making some money, but more importantly, learning about board wargames, their availability, value and potential. When I sold off my collection of, among other things, 45 SimCan games and 65 WW2 Mediterranean Theater games, I came to the realization that I was neither a collector nor an accumulator, but more of a historian and ephemerist.

In 1997 I took on the job of editor of the Strategy Gaming Society’s (remember that name?) newsletter Strategist, and had altogether far too much fun for two years. This was a golden opportunity for me on several counts: I could learn the trade first hand without worrying about the inevitable mistakes; I could give my creativity an outlet of expression; I could begin to make use of the gaming knowledge I had acquired; and I could determine whether I enjoyed writing about gaming as much as I enjoyed gaming itself. Although Strategist was only 8 to 12 pages long, its monthly publication schedule took up a lot of my time. It occurred to me that a publication that came out quarterly would require only marginally more time, but that time could be spread out over a longer period. A questionnaire I published while editor of Strategist (with an astounding 61% response) confirmed my impression that most wargamers and grognards were interested in the older collectible games. And since Rich Erwin’s Paper Wars was no longer a wargame collector’s journal, there was an empty niche in the war-gaming magazine world. Simulacrum was born. Alea iacta est.

So what’s the moral of the story? Well, like the old saying goes, if you have to ask... The fact is that our hobby, and quite possibly many others as well, exist and thrive only because there are a number of individual members who are willing and prepared to invest their time, and even their money, in it, for little if any concrete recompense. Take, for example, the authors who contributed to this issue of Simulacrum. Without them, Simulacrum would be little more than just another example of the vanity press. Their contributions provide a wonderful variety and make Simulacrum a viable proposition. Yet their entire recompense is a free copy of Simulacrum and maybe a game if they received it for review. I wasn’t far off in saying that about the most a contributor to Simulacrum can expect in the foreseeable future is the adulation of his or her peers.

I would like to thank publicly all those people who have contributed articles to Simulacrum, who have helped make it the success it is, and who have helped me look good despite my curriculum vitae. I would also like to take this one last opportunity to encourage you to help our hobby by volunteering to write an article for Simulacrum. It’s surprisingly easy to do and doesn’t take up very much time. Send me an email with your snail-mail address, and I’ll send you a copy of the Contributors’ Guidelines by return post.