Abundans cautela non nocet

I have long pondered your assertion that a serious collector must use the internet to procure collectable board wargames. I have come to the conclusion that anyone that pursues your advice is looking for some real heartache.

Our hobby of board wargaming is very small and the collectable wargame market has even less of a pool of customers to draw from. The various objects of our desire remain a mystery to the collecting public at large (jumble sale regulars, storage locker auctioneers, antique dealers, etc.) and I assume that this ignorance extends to the people that operate eBay and the other online auction sites.

This lack of knowledge on the part of service providers nulls any attempts that they might make to curtail the rigging of auctions for board wargames. Add to this the anonymity of the internet, the ease of setting up faux email identities to shill, collude or spread misinformation, the tiny commissions charged by eBay and similar concerns, and the ability to rig an auction becomes appallingly simple.

I have had the pleasure of a postal relationship with a great many folks buying and selling games and the vast majority of them are what everyone would expect: decent, honest people.

There are, unfortunately, a small minority of ethically bankrupt individuals in our hobby and their presence makes internet bidding hazardous. Some months ago you may have read of an incident involving a lawyer from Sacramento CA who was offering paintings he had found that were in the style of noted artists such as Richard Diebenkorn and others. This man had set up several faux sites that praised his selling site with fictitious testimonials and also used accomplices to shill for him and inflate the bid price. This scheme worked for over two years and was never discovered by the internal auditors at eBay. He was only caught when he tried to palm off a supposed painting from Richard Diebenkorn’s first non-figurative Berkeley period to a well informed Dutch collector. The final bid was over $130,000 US and our man was unable to provide provenance and disallowed an independent appraisal by the buyer. Had he stuck with his previous method of concentrating upon lesser known artists and amateur collectors with just enough knowledge to be fooled, he might still be operating today.

There is no reason to believe that this sort of scam is not being perpetrated upon online purchasers of collectable board war games, the only difference between these crooks and our lawyer from Sacramento is that they have cashiered their morals for a lot less cash.

Anyone using an online auction should always use a credit card to pay for purchases. If the seller will not accept a credit card, do not do business with him. This way, if you get burned by someone selling misrepresented merchandise, you can sic Visa after him as well. Also report anything that smacks of a scam to the auditors of the online auction house that you are using. If they do not have auditors, stop using their service altogether. If you are not treated fairly by a seller, post your experience and let others learn from your mistakes. Even if a buyer has to beware, it does not allow internet sellers to act in anything other than a fair, honest and direct manner. I recommend the use of the more traditional methods of seeking the rare game. The potential for abuse in internet transactions is too great in such a specialized and unregulated market such as ours.

Extreme caution does no harm. It’s the kind of endearing principle designed to ensure that even if we found ourselves alone in the pilot seat of a Boeing 747 with the engines running, we wouldn’t even consider trying to get the thing airborne. Personally I wouldn’t even try to turn the engines off before I left, for fear of hitting the warp drive switch or the wing flapping toggle or the ejection seat hot button by mistake. No, I would just go, as fast as I possibly could.

Clearly, however, there are some people who are quite prepared to flaunt this dictum brazenly, because I’m certain that the 747’s I see flying around all the time are not doing so by divine guidance. And considering how few 747’s appear to have scrapes or gouges or dents or burn marks on them, the people who are flying them must be either pretty good or pretty lucky. I pick good, because they are trained and practised and experienced. In the same vein, the internet is not a particularly scary or dangerous place for those people who are experienced with it, who know what they’re doing and what they want.

There are items that I’ve found on eBay that I doubt I would ever have found otherwise. There is information and data that would have taken years to amass. To me, avoiding the internet because of the danger of predators is like eschewing a walk in the woods because there might be grizzly bears. One of the intended effects of Simulacrum is to provide you with the data and knowledge to go onto the internet and find exactly what you want for an agreeable price. Yes, extreme caution does no harm. But extreme caution does no good either. -ed

Sturmovik und Drang

I have a friend who used to work at Avalon Hill, and he had a file containing photocopies of the data for the Battleline Expansion Kit which would have become Sturmovik. He cleaned out his basement and gave the file to me.

Existence confirmed -ed.

Words & Worsery

Yeah, I liked it too! The latest issue of Simulacrum had a pointy headed academician’s review of it and I hated it. He was so hoity toity about the fantasy world either not being Tolkien-like enough or too Tolkien-like or some such rigamarole. We had a great time playing it and you’d think that would be enough, but no, he had to critique the story behind it, not the game.

Unlike reviews of historical wargames, which must critique the game, but not the story behind it. -ed

Rand Ludography

Rand Games, a whole subunit of the hobby of game collecting. They produced two lines of subscription games, the first six folio sized and the next series full sized. Several games used a square grid using their time-space system, which made movement a function of the hypotenuse of a right angle (Omaha Beach, Lee at Gettysburg, among others). They did an excellent Cambrai 1917 game in their first series, as well as the classic Missile Boat, still the best simulation of small ship missile combat in the hobby, with extensive historical scenarios, a campaign system, and a ship construction system sufficient to allow you to design helicopter carriers if you wanted to. Also a solar system game was part of the first sub series. Second series included John Prados’s Von Manstein, Battles in the Ukraine, which has been reprinted by OSG, then Avalon Hill, then CoSi, making it one of the most rescued game designs in the history of the hobby. They also did Hitler’s Last Gamble, a bulge game which had serious problems. Last Gamble was one of many games produced using SPI’s France 40/Kursk game system and demonstrated the reason you don’t use a two-week game turn system at a half-day per turn scale, which is why the game failed. It also featured the first minigame in the hobby, and coined the phrase minigame, an unplayable relief of Bastogne scenario.

Rand also released mounted versions of two of its first series games, the above mentioned Gettysburg title and Sicily: Monty vs. Kesselring under their Gamut of Games label. Second series also included a pedestrian game on the Peninsular Campaign. Lastly there were two Rand games released by West End Games, a Marlboro battle game and The Great War, Prados’s expansion of Third Reich to the era of the Second Reich, and a must have game for the grand strategy collector. Rand Games staff included Dave Isby and John Prados among others. They were fearful of lawsuits. Someone over at SPI gave them a copy of their customer list, which angered the folks in New York. They went out of their way to invent new names and abbreviations for wargaming terms, e.g., CCC for CRT, for fear Avalon Hill or SPI would shut them down. They did come out with innovative packaging, plug cut counters (no trimming necessary) and a few good ideas, like the variant matrix, which allowed you in some games to always play with a slightly different scenario.

One minor correction: the complete first Rand sub series was nine (not six) folio games: Lee vs. Meade; Saratoga 1777; Cambrai, 1917; Invasion: Sicily; Missile Boat; Napoleon’s Last Campaigns; Omaha Beach; Rommel: The War for North Africa; and War of the Worlds II. Their full size games also included Brandy Station and Vicksburg.

Until such time as we do a Rand Special Issue, this information will have to suffice. -ed And Now for Something Completely Different

By the way, of all the wargame mags I get (or would get if they publish them) yours is without a doubt the best!! I really owe you something as a contributor, but the Army keeps me pretty busy. Oh, most importantly, the words you provided to the Monty Python Philosopher song came in handy at work one day. I got tired of hearing a fellow history professor, who also was a war gamer in the 1970s, butchering the words whenever we discussed military philosophers. I had to use Simulacrum to set him straight. He was convinced because the synergy of Monty Python and Wargamers from the 1970s is an impenetrable argument. Thanks.

Shut that bloody bouzouki up! -ed

Our First Award of Recognition

It has come to our attention that you published an item concerning Spartan International that put that despicable organization in its proper perspective. Many of us owe Brian Libby, the Winston Churchill of Wargaming, a debt of gratitude for his timely warnings about this threat to the hobby and decency in general. This qualifies you for one of the minor awards distributed by the foundation. The awards are given in three yearly installments. You may expect two more. Thank you for your integrity and courage.

In the Analecta & Bullshit section of issue 6, we published a photograph of some Spartan International homonyms from 1972, along with a suitably ascerbic caption. The award we received from the Foundation was real, not insubstantial, and totally unexpected. -ed.