Oh yeah. I started playing wargames (by playing, I mean, I got one and started fiddling with it, because I couldn’t convince anyone to play such a thing with me) around, um, 1972. AH’s Luftwaffe, believe it or not. Hardly the best to start with, but those little cardboard counters were cool! Soon enough I discovered SPI and I remember finally convincing my father to play a game of WWII: European Theater of Operations, which came out in like 1973. I, um, misread the rules and we were doing some weird attack and defense stuff that defied mathematics, but it was fun. For me, at least. My father, not so much I don’t think.
Anyhow, from that point I was obsessed, as only a teenager can be, with wargames. Every cent I had went into these things (well, and records, of course, actual vinyl things). I badgered my parents into letting me go every Saturday to a wargame group that met in Decatur, initially, and it was what I dreamed of all week (nerd alert!). A whole day of talking military history, playing wargames, talking about wargames, you name it.
But it wasn’t all bliss, to get to the point here. There were always those in the group who were, shall we say, assholes. Some were of the “I know everything about X, don’t even try to challenge my encyclopedic knowledge!” variety (pre-Google, this was an easier bullshit line to pull off). These were, though, easily ignorable. Some were the aforementioned wargame snobs, who disdained non-war board games and even less complex wargames. If it wasn’t DNO or CNA, or whatever the latest super-complex game was, it was crap. These were even more easily ignored.
No, the worst were the ideologues, sadly most of them seemingly on loan from the local Gauleiter’s office. Guys who would never, ever play the Russians, even in a WWII game. Guys who wore Wehrmacht regalia, had “Gott mit uns” belt buckles (or worse, " Meine Ehre heißt Treue"). These folks often subscribed to wild conspiracy theories, some were ex-military (often, discharged under murky circumstances), and had predictably reactionary domestic political positions, which they all too often insisted on discussing, loudly.
It never got as bad as at the firing range (I quit target shooting and sold my nice gun collection years later partly due to not being able to stomach yet another session at the range surrounded by literal neo-Nazis shooting (irony of ironies) fully automatic Uzis at targets shaped like African Americans; this was in Georgia), but it often was annoying. Later in life I’d meet more of the wargaming tribe–the radical leftists who only played the Soviets, the stoners who glommed on to the infinite detail of the game systems while under the influence, etc. It was, for sure, an eclectic community.
