Or at least a couple of cases of Trappist Westvleteren 12.
Heh, there’s more expensive stuff than that:
http://www.multimanpublishing.com/Products/tabid/58/ProductID/309/Default.aspx
I’m of two minds on the cost of wargames. On one hand, for a hobby made up of a lot of middle-aged guys with reasonable incomes, it doesn’t seem particularly expensive. But for younger players, this could be a barrier, and then how does the hobby grow? I remember when I was in 7th grade, I had a paper route that paid $4 a week (it was a weekly paper). We got paid monthly. I spent every single one of those checks on board wargames. Avalon Hill bookcase games at that time cost $16. Perfect! I couldn’t even imagine a $100 wargame then. Dunno how a $60-$80 wargame compares these days.
Anyway, Enemy Action: Ardennes is way better than the Steel Wolves / Silent War games, in my opinion. I’ve got 'em. Not close.
Heh, the Multiman Market-Garden games are like $400 for both. I love that VG game system; it was a great system back in the day and I’m sure still good today (board games being somewhat more immune to the march of time). But, um, no.
I used to mow lawns for cash, usually my grandmother’s if we were living in Atlanta at the time (Army family, moved a lot). Eight bucks a mow (it was very steep, and awful to mow, with a push mower at first and later a non-motorized gas mower). Eight dollars would buy a SPI flatbox game. Twelve bucks would get me an AH boxed game. SPI Quads (four folio games) were also twelve I think, and monster games 20 or more. But yeah, it was a lot more affordable back then.
But even then, you had stuff like Streets of Stalingrad, Campaign for North Africa, all the Europa games if you tried to get 'em all, etc.
I’d be tempted to try the Enemy Action game even for a hundred clams but I have no real place to set it up any more, nor, I’m afraid, the patience to do so.
Don’t tell that to @tomchick! He’ll give you a long talk about the Time Before Good Games.
Yeah, I do remember seeing Streets of Stalingrad advertised when I was a kid, and thinking I could never afford it. (Now I have two copies.)
Too bad you don’t live in Portland or I’d re-introduce you to the joys of face-to-face wargaming.
I remember going to the hardware store in Montgomery Ohio in the late 70’s and spending 20 minutes staring at the Blitzkrieg, Panzer Leader and Panzer Blitz boxes. For some reason a hardware store sold them. The owner must have been a grog. It seemed like it took a hundred shoveled driveways to buy just one game.
I often wonder if there isn’t a many worlds branch of me that kept all his 70’s, 80’s and 90’s war games. Kept them and cared for them and cherished them. I wonder if he is happier. Probably. Divorced and living among the piles but probably content on some hoarding level. Of course that’s just an extreme. Surely there is a compromise branch in the multiverse?
Instead in my branch I went through life accumulating and purging when some move or the other seemed to demand a draconian culling of the collection.
I did put those little hole protectors on my ASL rule book binder way back in the day.
In grad school the second time, I sold off my 400 or so wargames to pay bills. And to clean house, really. Do I miss them? Sometimes, but, nah.
Face to face gaming is not something I’ve done in ages, not since I was doing a post-doc at the University of Tennessee back in 1994-5, when I worked with some gamers and we had Saturday game nights. The only gaming that goes on up here as far as I can tell is Magic and the odd D&D/Pathfinder campaign run by students.
Well, since we’re hitching our pants up to our chest and telling old man stories: I remember as a kid getting Panzer Blitz. It was AWESOME. I had no friends who would play these, so I played everything solo. But even then, I could just picture the action in my head and play it out on the board.
Years later, SSI came out with their first wargames for the Apple ][. And suddenly: solo play. With fog of war. Once again - AWESOME. I remember playing Computer Ambush, where you’d have a squad of men and several scenarios, like trying to get through a cool village with church towers, crumbling buildings, etc. The moves from the computer AI were SOOOO slow but I didn’t care. The only problem was that the AI would always seem to put their men in the same positions, which ruined the fog of war and the tension. No email or internet back then, so I wrote a letter to SSI about this and got a paper mail reply from the programmers, telling me that each AI soldier in each scenario had a couple of locations they could be in, and it was random which one they chose, but they included a disk in the reply and showed me how to run it. It increased the number of random locations for each AI soldier from two to seven!
Again - AWESOME.
I need to get back into computer wargaming, I used to play a ton and covered them for computer magazines and websites but haven’t played one in a while.
And I remember those days too. Ah the halcyon days of 80’s Avalon Hill, I was 4 and wouldn’t know wargames for another two decades. My family thought board games meant Monopoly and Sorry. Just to make you all feel a bit older.
But, non snark, I’ve never actually played a cardboard wargame. You guys do make me jealous for those days though.
I’ve set up and fondled the pieces more than I have actually played with real live humans. That’s why computer gaming is still so important to me since at my core I’m a misanthropic hermit.
When my brother and I were kids we actually did try and play Third Reich a bunch of times. The last game ended with me throwing the boards up after my die roll for my drive on Paris went south. I was (can still be) such an idiot some times.
The days before the Internet were so odd, compared to today. Patches, if there were any, came in the mail on floppies. You could get whole games you typed in in Basic, or which came on strips, which you could read with some weird strip reader, in magazines. I remember speaking on the phone to the programmers or designers (often the same person) of games, discussing AI issues or bugs.
It was…interesting. But I like Steam and digital delivery and day one patches better I think.
While I got a few patches mailed to me to on disk, by the late 80s most bigger publishers had a BBS for patches. I remember making 6+ hour long distance calls to download patches (all the while making sure no one picked up the phone). It was the bigger games, like Darklands, where I remember getting multiple disks mailed to me. Fun times.
Nice try!
Ah, yes BBS. Wildcat, etc. I remember browsing Doom .wads and what not, as well as demos, shareware, etc. All on blistering fast dial up at 1400 bps!
Avalon Hill stories?
I have a mint copy of this baby
And this baby
And this baby
At this point, they’re probably more valuable if I never play them.
Yeah, those were fairly late-ish in the heyday of AH, but very cool games IIRC. As you say, worth more unpunched than played for sure.
I just had to come here to brag a bit. Won the second game of ASL I’ve ever played. I was the Russian’s in S5: Commissar’s house.
My plan was to start out spread out and delay / injure as I retreated. Some lucky dice rolls including a few casualties from booby traps and snipers and I was able to get my opponent to concede. Of course he was probably taking it easy on the newbie seeing he’s a 30 year vet of it but it was still fun to win a game I fully expected to get trounced in.
When did ASL come out, originally? The web tells me 1985 but that seems sort of late. But my memory is not so solid…
1985 sounds right. ASL is still my favorite war game to this day. I played for hundreds of hours years ago but eventually did get tired of it. My friend and I played an entire campaign of Red Barricades that lasted for years because we played it off and on. As I recall, the game came down to the last turn and a single dice roll as I pulled off the win. It was epic.
Ah, yeah, you’re right; it was Cross of Iron I got in the late 70’s that I remember more clearly. I did get ASL when it released (with Beyond Valor I guess?) but can’t recall much about that.
Yeah, I played the original Squad Leader as well, but not the expansions, which I also own. It wasn’t until ASL came along that I found the system understandable enough (the rules were much better written IMHO) that I was able to play with everything (well, except for the amphibious assault rules and all the complex PTO rules which I never did play).