You can design a wargame. If you like to modify the rules to your favorite war games... If you’re an expert Game Master (or if you’d like to learn)... If you’ve got notebooks filled with ideas for NEW games... If you’d like to have your game designs published professionally... Read this book.

If you don’t know who Steve Jackson is, please put this magazine down right now before you hurt yourself. A prolific designer of fantasy board and role playing games, Steve is perhaps best known for having had his business raided by the FBI, who soiled their undersilks, first in excitement and then in embarrassment. Nick Schuessler is more of a gaming theoretician, having published The Journal of WWII Wargaming and taught a course in wargame research and design at the University of Texas. Together, they co-authored this 52-page, 8 1/1”x11” book, which was published by Steve Jackson Games in 1981.

The first 12 chapters were taken from Steve Jackson’s magazine, The Space Gamer in 1980 and 1981. The last two chapters were entirely new. Volume 2 was intended to be published in 1982 and was to include articles on component design aids, details on applied probability and hints on the best markets for your games. Whether this sequel ever came out is a matter for conjecture, as Steve Jackson Games did not respond to my query.

The table of contents includes:

Chapter	Contents
1	Theoretical Foundations
2	Historical Background
3	Mapping and Movement
4	Terrain
5	Combat and Play Sequence
6	Combat Strength and Resolution
7	Advanced Combat Systems
8	Research
9	Components
10	Playtesting
11	RPG Design
12	Designing for the Market
13	Game Evaluation
14	Bibliography Afterword

This book will be as useful in helping you become the next Jim Dunnigan as Jon Nagy’s Learn to Draw book would help you become the next Michelangelo. It’s more like Cole’s Notes for The Agony and the Ecstasy, a compilation of all of the nouns and none of the adjectives.

In its day, Game Design would have been pedantry masquerading as instruction; a cynic might have believed that this book was intended only to establish the bona fides of the authors. But it has mellowed with age and, 20 years later, it’s a quaint bit of ephemera, vaguely interesting but insubstantial.

By some fluke, the Simulacrum library happens to contain two copies of this book. One copy must remain, but the other copy is available free to the gentle reader who sends me the most interesting reason for requiring a copy in his or her own personal library. You may send me email or snailmail, and the deadline for receipt of entries is June 30, 2001. As usual, the Judge’s decision is final.