Old Question - New Group

[Askari19]

After reading through this thread, I'm heartened. I guess I may (may!) not be the oldest fart in the sack. Great to hear all your stories and reflect back on mine.

I started wargaming in 1961 (if you don't count massive basement battles with those cool 3" plastic ACW soldiers, must have been a hundred of 'em beating on the drum...), when I was 9yo and walking through a Rexall Drug in Rock Hill, Missouri with my dad and saw AH's Bismarck on the shelf: $4.98, I'd built the model and loved the Johnny Horton song, and had to have it. Went on to buy and play each annual AH release through the 60s. Played them all, still have most of them, but wore out Afrika Korps - the counters were unreadable! Had to buy a new one. Even played it and some of the others by (snail) mail - when patience was still a virtue, or at least a necessity.

Panzerblitz was what I was waiting for; I guess that was 1970, and by time I caught my breath I had three sets, and two of Panzer Leader, and was playing massive double-blind custom scenarios on hand-drawn maps that took days on end, with one good friend in particular. I spent a year or so with SL/ASL, but never got into it as much as PzB; after several more decades of snapping up most modern-era tactical games, I still get bored with that scale - modeling a firefight, especially with a manual system that takes 10x or 100x the "real world" time represented, just doesn't do it for me. Ditto for most miniatures systems, though I have a heap of 1970s vintage MicroArmor (will sell!). Platoons and sections, 250m hexes - that's still what I like in modern tactics. SPI had a great system going for a while - Kampfpanzer, Panzer '44, MechWar '77 and October War - Dunnigan's further development of the PzB concept. They didn't have the pizzaz or production values of PzB but were very good designs. And of course more other modern tactical titles than I had time to play, as I grudgingly grew up and got a life. GDW Assault was probably the last modern tactical board game I played very much.

Collected the SPI titles for years - accumulated hundreds of them and actually played most of them at least a few times. I remember a game of War in Europe in a friend's garage in Clearwater, FL in 1977 - at least a dozen of us playing 10-12 hour days each weekend for a couple of months, and we got almost to 1941 before he had to remodel the garage and that was the end of that.

Played lots of other scales and periods too - including the SPI ACW series, Terrible Swift Sword and the rest, and stepping up to what we then called the operational scale with Wacht am Rhein, culminating in Korsun Pocket from Peoples' War Games. Anybody else remember Jack Radey, the hobby's flaming Marxist? Brilliant designer with politics somewhere between laughable and despicable, a hoot to listen to at Origins....

My first PC was a TRS-80 sometime around 1982. Tried all those early games others have mentioned.... dabbled with programming some computer-assist routines for the monster games I was still wanting to play. When Victory Games started offering that WaR/Korsun system for the PC, and then Talonsoft brought TSS back to life, I was in wargaming heaven again.

For some reason (job? marriage? something...) I was late discovering EF but now, although I sample newer games now and then, and may loop back into the Napoleonics and ACW titles at some point, CS is about all I make time to play. Did the same with my favorite boardgame systems, stuck with ones I knew for a long time even when newer, sexier stuff came along. I like a mature system that I know well enough that I'm not buried in figuring out (or getting ambushed by!) the mechanics - I can focus on the tactics. Like somebody else said, after a long diet of solitaire gaming against the AI, I'm still getting humbled by the quality of the human opposition here... a great challenge.

I spent a career along the way in nuclear security for DOE, lots of fun with small arms and small unit tactics and field training, professional (read ponderous, overpriced) computer simulations, tactical decision games and tabletop gaming for training and validation purposes - the rare conjunction of vocation with avocation. A good life! And the fun continues. It's great getting acquainted with the Blitz crowd; I wonder if there are any of my old gaming buds out there....?

Cheers,
Bill Tallen
(Askari19)