Old Question - New Group

[RADO]

Wow! Lot's of good input above!

I got involved in boardgames at the ripe age of about 12 when I saw a "Broadside" game being played. Then it was Tactics 2 in about 1965, as I recall, and many, many, other board games after that. We used to play-by-mail, a real hoot for people nowadays that are not familiar, using stock market number results for combat resolution (to replace the die roll)!

At about 16, I was introduced to 25mm Napoleonic miniatures, and that went on for several years, but my real interest was antiquity, which I got into heavily over tyhe next 30 years. Switched from 25mm miniatures to 15mm miniatures somewhere along the line. Wrote some ancient rules and still game it once in awhile.

It was at "Historicon" in Pennsylvania many years ago when I saw one of the vendors with a computer (very rare at that time), and he was doing a demo on East Front. Talonsoft! I loved the graphics and idea of the game, and nowadays I play CS as my primary game of choice, but still do bit of miniature gaming now and then.

The Blitz has been a staple for computer wargames for many years, and I'm very happy & pleased that so many good people have stayed with the Blitz!

All we need now is a good annual Blitz wargaming convention here in the states!

[Ashcloud]

John,

I think sadness is a good word. We lost a good one in Jim Puff.
I've been toying with bringing back the "Jim Puff Top Gun" tourney.

But, I think someone else should run it. Raven and I herded the "top guns" along. At the end the two foes took forever to finish.
Raven is no longer visiting the club. And, I have to admit, Jim's passing took the wind out of my sails.
I'd assist anyone in running the tourney. I just do not think I can front it with the daily running of it. I'll look up the old tourney rules and see which members qualify for the tourney.
Maybe make a separate post on it and see if any of the "top guns" are interested. I think the badge is still around.
Instead of running the most balanced scenarios by ladder sort, do the ones that have passed the H2H testing process?

It was supposed to be an annual thing. I fear I dropped the ball.

Regards,

Ed

Hi Ed,

As you know I am the facilitator of The Official World in Flames Tournament and I am also in the process if trying to revive the Bite the Bullet Tournament, would you like me to take a look at reviving the Top Gun Tournament? I also have the making of another Tournament in the works, but I don't want to reveal too much yet (would like the other Tournaments to get sorted or further along first) but is will also involve a sort of "top gun" type challenge. Email me.

Regards,
Ashley

[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)

[Larry Reese]

What a great read, Bill. And you reminded me of two things:

1. GDW - I'm assuming you're talking about Game Designers Workshop here. What a great set of guys and games! Them and Steve Jackson. GDW had a title out that I've never seen equalled, called Striker. It was miniature rules for ground combat in the Traveller RPG, but it was vastly more than that. Because Traveller dealt with all levels of technology, Striker allowed you to easily fight a Roman Legion (or similiarly armed troops) against a mechanized infantry combat team, or even against futuristic opponents armed with powered grav-mobile battle suits and fusion weapons. Great morale and leadership rules, and included budgeting and purchase rules and a whole host of other things that covered everything you'd need to run your own custom designed military. But what blew me away, and what really set this apart, were the vehicle design rules. You could design anything your heart desired. From a war chariot, to a grav tank with a 35 megawatt x-ray pulse laser. Autocannons. Sensing systems. Wheels, tracks, air cushion vehicles, grav, fixed wing, helicopters, it was all there and all seamlessly integrated. God that was great fun. The example in the book for tracked vehicles was the design of a Panther tank (you had to also design the main gun itself and ammunition) and the system worked so well that only very minor descrepancies were to be found between the actual tank and its performance and that of the one designed through the system. An increidible effort, I must say.

But I digress. The second thing you brought up, was using those early computers as aids to conventional war gaming. GDW had another system called High Guard out (design, maintenance, and operation of fleets of spacecraft within the Traveller system) and I spent many hours writing software routines to automate the seriously heavy dice combat system. System worked perfectly, even had a built in randomizer subroutine to avoid the effects of the fact that random number generators really aren't random. Sometimes I think I should have pursued programming as career instead of doing what I did.

And to think, I thought at one time I was the only person who was enthralled by Panzerblitz. LOL.

LR