Are you trying to addict me to BSG crack?
“Just walking through the Grognard thread…oooooh…lookie…BSG stuff…hmmmm” You already have me ensnared in your Boardgame creation. You want me to be a junkie too?
If it makes you feel any better, I’m neck deep in X-wing miniatures, and they just announced a Battlestar Galactica miniatures game that strikes me as very similar.
Odds I don’t wind up with a few minis… approaching zero
Ok, I am prepared to disprove the idea that “There aren’t more games; but you are hearing about a lot more than you did 30 years ago.” I went through the BGG wargames category for 1980. Interestingly, a much larger percentage of the games listed made my list as actual “wargames” than in 2018, but the overall number was lower. Out of 131 (!) games under “Wargame” for 1980, there were only 56 actual wargames. And 38 of those were boxed. Tne file is available on the same page listed above for the 2017 discussion.
I will admit, I thought the difference would be larger. But it’s essentially half the total compared to 2017.
Does that include Print and Play? What if those were excluded? Remember, published wargames. Print and play wasn’t a thing in 1980…unfair comparison.
Print-n-Play games were not included in the 2017 count, and they weren’t included in the 1980 count, either. There were several Perry Moore “desktop published” games in 1980 that I didn’t count. I didn’t count any of Paul Rohrbaugh’s essentially P-n-P games in 2017.
Also note that I was pretty strict in 2017 with games that were sorta historical, but didn’t make it on mechanics or some such. In 1980, I pretty much allowed any historical game which even tried to represent some history we know, even if the mechanics weren’t that of an actual hex wargame. I also allowed a couple of “self-published” games in 1980 because they were clearly well-produced boxed products, even though they weren’t by a “publishing company.” Whereas in 2017, self-pub was an automatic disqualifier.
What there were more of in 1980 were books about wargames. Four of them. By actual book publishers like William Morrow and Simon & Schuster.
Good stuff! That is a name that strikes horror in my soul.
Why so?
Btw, do you know how many boxed wargames Avalon Hill and GDW published combined in 1980? Seven. In 2017, GMT published ten.
And I am counting Dragon Pass as a wargame, because everyone knows that Glorantha is real.
Interesting. The quantity must have been astounding. Basically, micro-publishing and P500 have allowed a cottage industry to thrive. But the “industrial giants” are long gone.
Concur. No one will argue that.
SPI published 15 wargames in 1980. Two were magazine-only, and three were boxed versions of games that had come out in S&T previously, taking us down to ten. So for actual boxed wargames, GMT is now the equivalent of SPI.
Like I was saying above, if we could get our hands on volume of units moved, we could analyze the whole industry. I’d join you in your madness then.
One of the few times I got into hot water writing reviews occurred in the early '80s. I had written a comparative review of VG’s NATO and Yaquintos Red Storm, in issue #39 of Fire & Movement. That went well enough, and I received Perry Moore’s Operation Badr, published by West End Games, to review for issue #40. I cannot recall the details (after all, it was 1983), but for whatever reason I loathed that game. I sent my review in and man, people were not pleased. Helfferich, the editor at the time I think, IIRC sent the review to Moore for feedback, for some reason, and Moore was Not Amused. The net result was the review was 86’d and was given to someone else and appeared in #40. I don’t think I wrote for them again after that one.
It’s entirely possible that, as I was in the midst of my first stint in grad school, at UVA getting my masters in foreign affairs, that I did a crappy job on the review. It’s also entirely possible that the game was crappy. At that time I was doing a fair amount of work on the October War, and was probably in that grad-student state of knowing just enough to make yourself feel you know it all (anyone who has been through MA and Ph.D. programs probably can grok that).
The comments on Operation Badr in BGG were interesting. One guy claims the map has 20 different types of hexes and there’s like 25 different VP locations, which aren’t depicted on the map.
I suspect your misgivings had to do with being too busy with your master’s work to enjoy the apparent low playability of the game :)
Oddly enough, when I was working on my Ph.D., writing and other extracurricular stuff was actually easier. Of course, by then I’d been working outside of academia before I came back and was able to realize just how less intimidating school actually was…
The best way to fight writer’s block for me was to look into stuff which wasn’t related to my topic of research… when you subconscious sends you a clear message asking for something different it is for the better to oblige :)
Wise words indeed!
Aka “do stuff for fun”. :)