I had intended to use the Wreck of the Pandora system for an HQcentric war game, but I left the game business before I was able to do it. NATO Division Commander was also an attempt to create a non-standard solution to game design challenges. So was Empires of the Middle Ages.

Remember that for Arabian Nightmare the political game was created in August and September of 1990 — I was inventing Saddam’s options as he went along. I made one last pass at the rules in early November 1990. What the AN political game does is inject a sense of the uncertainty that existed during the five months prior to launching Desert Storm. No other Gulf War game I know of ever attempted that, whether done before the Kuwait invasion or after. If you play through the AN political game you get a better feel of what it’s like to try and run a military operation when politics are in flux.

Don’t read the Republican and Democrat president rules too rigidly ... they represent general attitudes, the interventionist versus the reluctant. Air War was a second generation modern air to air combat game from SPI (the first was the much simpler Foxbat and Phantom). Air War was pretty complex, but also quite accurate for a manual game. According to our mail and the zoomies I ran into, it was popular with the fighter jocks.

Perfect Plan articles in the General were common in the 1960s. All simple games (like the SPI Quads) were prone to being analyzed like a chess game, and many wargamers were avid chess players. Of the early AH games, I believe Stalingrad was the most prone to the development of different opening moves.

We’ll never have the good old days back. At SPI, I had the regular feedback data tracking the changeover, as well as formal and informal focus groups with the kids. Wargames were big through the 1970s because they were the only mentally challenging game for that population segment. Once RPGs and computer games came in, the wargames lost their monopoly. We could see it in our sales figures as well: the SciFi and fantasy titles outsold the wargames. I even did a few SciFi games myself, and they outsold most of my wargame titles. Everything is change.

PCs saved manual wargaming by making it a lot easier and cheaper to produce the artwork and write rules.

Yes there was a fad element to war gaming. At the time I would often mention the model railroad experience (which actually began in the late 1940s), SciFi books and comic books. But the big difference, and the scariest thing, was the demographics of wargamers. Very upscale. Too upscale. Around SPI we jokingly called it the hobby of the over-educated, and you know how fickle that crew can be.

The SPI feedback clearly showed (via regression and factor analysis of the data over time) that the younger wargamers were clearly more into mash and bash. The older that gamers got, the more interested they were in strategic, and more thoughtful, games.

The card based games (including Ace of Aces) appeal to a wider range of people. This has always been the case, and was the only thing to really hurt D&D’s market (computer games only made minor dents, as the multiplayer aspect of D&D was always one of its biggest draws).

Wargaming was a fad mainly because the media jumped all over it. Anything that had war and game in it’s name and was practiced largely by geeks was irresistible to editors and producers. It was never a mass fad, but neither was goldfish swallowing in the 1920s or streaking in the 1970s. What really drove wargames out of the stores was better inventory control and slotting fees.

The S&T ads in the various magazines and comics made heavy use of demographic research and analysis of results. It was one of the things that made it clear how small the wargames market was. It was pretty straightforward. We matched the demos from the feedback with the media demos (from Standard Rate & Data) and the CPM for the media and ran ads that looked likely to succeed. It worked, but it was also obvious what the overall size of the wargame audience was. The curse of statistics, so to speak.

In the early days, we used whatever historical stats we could find to build a prototype CRT. We would then test and modify within the prototype game until it was possible to recreate the historical outcomes. DuPuys’ source data is very good, perhaps the best collection of battle data involving US forces. The Russians published similar data for their ops (Battle Losses of the 20th Century, or something like that).