SimCan comes by its status as a third-world wargaming company honestly. For example, it took a superhuman effort by SimCan’s U.S. distributors before Steve was persuaded to get his games out of plastic bags and into cardboard boxes. But he wasn’t really convinced, and before the distributors had a chance to properly congratulate themselves, Steve got his games out of cardboard boxes and back into plastic. Then there were his rulebooks, notorious for their intensity, like being forced to read microfilm with binoculars. And SimCan’s maps and counters had a charm and allure all their very own.

But SimCan has a following. The obligatory Gettysburg and Science Fiction games notwithstanding, SimCan games are unique. Steve’s many naval simulations are without equal, as befits a former naval man. And if the subject of a SimCan game is not unique, then its viewpoint and treatment are. You will see this for yourself in this issue. Discovering Simulations Canada was a classic example of the Columbus Effect for me … up to that point, my life was complete and I was happy. This all changed after I saw that name in the Fire & Movement ad, and I immediately took a proprietary interest in it, as befits a reactionary anarcho-nationalist. In this chauvinistic and highly volatile state, I wondered aloud why a good Canadian board war game company was paying an American to do its cover art. Quelle sac a l’ordure.

It didn’t take Steve Newberg long to wonder aloud right back at me. Never heard of you before was the gist of his comment, if I remember correctly. So I offered him a complimentary cover design of his choice, and he asked me to submit a design for his new wargame called Inchon. My proposal for Inchon Rodger MacGowan’s, but Steve thought that with some minor modifications, my design would be perfect for his reissue of Dieppe. Well, I may have been a starving artist, but I still had my principles. Change a piece of my art to suit the whims of a member of the military-industrial complex? Hah! He would have had more luck asking me to sell my soul. Much to my chagrin, there was an amazingly small market for my soul. Steve, being who he is (to wit, an ex-American who has adapted very well to the bucolic ways of the Canadian Maritimes), insisted on paying me for it despite my feeble protestations, and thus began a ten-year partnership during which I designed the cover art for 45 SimCan board and computer wargames.

Doing cover art for Steve was a challenge, on several levels. First of all, bear in mind that these were the days before computer graphics were affordable enough for the home, when Letraset and jewel-tipped Rotring pens were the thin edge of the technological edge. In fact, I didn’t even start to incorporate photographs into the cover art until the final few years. Secondly, the artwork had to be done in two colors plus black (the color of the paper didn’t count against these limitations, but nevertheless was invariably white); and without the availability of inexpensive computerized color separations, each color required its own hand-drawn master. Eventually I became very adept at judging the percentage fills of each of the two colors needed to produce one or more additional colors that weren’t brown and had no moire patterns. And last but not least, the subjects of Steve’s board wargames were invariably either naval, or they were oddities such as Norseman, the One World, the Peloponnesian War and Scourge of God, about which I knew, and my morgue contained, very little. The World Wide Web would have made research a much simpler matter.

On the other hand, the process was simplicity itself. Steve would give me a brief synopsis of the game needing cover art, and I would prepare one or two roughs (quick, unfinished drawings of the proposed design). Steve would put his comments, if any, directly on the roughs and return them to me. I would then prepare the three full-sized masters required for each design and ship them to Steve. In a manner reminiscent of Gilbert & Sullivan, Steve and I worked together like this on board and computer games (including Sieg in Afrika, the computer game I designed for him, Simulacrum passim ad nauseam) for 10 years, he on the Atlantic coast and I on the Pacific. To this day, we still haven’t met face to face. It may happen yet.

Steve only once turned down one of my cover art suggestions, and that was the original I designed for D.A.K. (see page 2). Ultimately, he used an element of the first design (Rommel’s head) for the cover of the rulebook. Another oddity about D.A.K. is that it was the only design I did for Steve in landscape, rather than portrait, orientation. And one final bit of ephemera: GDW tried to get Steve to change the title to something else, because GDW wanted to use D.A.K. for their own upcoming Europa game on North Africa. Steve published first, claiming the publishing equivalent of ius prima noctis, and GDW very reluctantly settled for Western Desert.

Finally, I proposed a small contest (guess my most favourite SimCan cover) and received innumerable entries (including was wrong).

Quite a bit gets lost in the translation because this image is in black and white rather than green and gold, and also because the master was very small which, ironically, is all I have left now. So you’ll just have to suspend your disbelief and take me at my word. What else is new?

The correct answer is Scourge of God, and Steve Carey was the only entrant who sussed this out. In fact and in retrospect, I suspect that Mr. Carey relied on his memory more than anything else because, much to my chagrin, I discovered that I’d already revealed my little secret in the SimCan folder on John Kranz’s ConsimWorld a few months ago. And, quelle chance, the message posted immediately after mine was from none other than, yes, Steve Carey. So Mr. Carey will receive the prize (yet to be determined) out of sheer spite for the rest of you who paid no attention to me.

The reason I like Scourge of God so much has to do partly with its creation … I struggled with that design for a very long time, before the inspiration burst upon me in an unexpected flash (thunder is good; thunder is great; but lightning gets the work done). After that, the details all fell into place perfectly. The only thing I’d change now would be the typeface, and only because there are so many more available now than there were then.