At the October Game Day Russ Lockwood treated us to a look at MagWeb, an Internet site that archives military history and gaming magazines. The selection is impressive and spans the hobby, including military history, miniatures, board games, computer games, and role-playing. Selected as a "Hot Site" by USA Today, MagWeb currently contains over 14,000 articles (1 Gigabit of data) reproduced in full text and graphics. Membership costs $59.95 a year and grants you access to all the articles and permission to download and print them. So for the price of a couple of magazine subscriptions you get access to more than 60 magazines, including back issues! The site continues to grow - adding about 22 new magazines to the archive every month. The site isn't limited to magazines, either. You'll also find excerpts from new books and game rules, and some original history articles.

Of course having a giant stack of magazines isn't automatically a good thing. You have to have a way to reach into the stack and get out the good stuff. So I spent some time poking around the site. I found it to be very user friendly. You can search the archive by magazine title or by historical period. Graphics like maps are kept small enough that they won't choke your browser, but you can link to a larger version if you want it. Other SJCW members that tried out the site were equally impressed. It only took a minute or two of browsing to find something useful: a scenario, order of battle, campaign system, map, game review, book excerpt, or historical battle report.

If you have a computer with Internet access you owe it to yourself to try out MagWeb! Just surf on over to www.magweb.com where you'll find about 100 free sample articles, including one from every magazine. I'll bet you find something good. I'll bet you like MagWeb.