One more lament to add the Bluesman’s list was the screwing over handed to subscribers to Strategy & Tactics magazine (this was a SPI product not AH).
When SPI folded it sold all of its product line, inventory, trademarks, copyrights, etc to TSR, another company. One of these products was Strategy & Tactics, a bimonthly magazine. Subscribers to this magazine were then told that SPI’s Strategy & Tactics was no longer being issued, their subscriptions were null and void, and they would not get any refund. If they wanted to subscribe to TSR’s Strategy & Tactics, a magazine with the same name, editorial staff, and even ongoing issue numbers, they could start a new subscription just like anyone else.
I was not a subscriber at the time so I did not personally get burned by this decision. But didn’t anyone at TSR consider that slapping their most loyal customer base in the face might not be in the best long term interests of the company?
When I was in high school we played “Richthofen’s War” a WW1 air combat game.
I remember a time I was “flying” an SE5-A and so shot up I couldn’t climb, dive, turn or shoot. Such laughs.
Bump
I was rummaging through the ‘game room’ in our basement recently and gazed fondly at the row of bookcase games sitting on the shelf collecting dust: War At Sea, War in the Pacific, Rise & Decline of the Third Reich, Afrika Korps, Tactics 2, 1776, War and Peace, Stalingrad, Kingmaker, Diplomacy, Squad Leader, and Civilization were several of the titles on the shelf I recalled playing back in the late 70s/early 80s. Thing is, I don’t know what to do with these old board games. I mean, I could probably pick them up and play them tomorrow with only a minimal refresher on the rules, but I really don’t have anyone to play them with. I wonder if anyone would buy them on ebay?
Well there’s one of the listed games that’s on part 6 and is considered one of the best PC series of all time even if I think 70 percent of the last iteration had dumb decisions …
so who owns the rights to civilization? I know there was a huge kerfuffle over that because that’s how the “call to Power” games were made by people who weren’t Sid Meier and Firaxis/MicroProse games and there was a huge lawsuit over trademark rights and how much of the original game was being used and such
Memories, sigh. I do have a latter-day version of Diplomacy, but the rest got scattered to the four winds by my extreme disorganization when a young man, and by several subsequent moves.
Before we got into D&D, we played many old school AH games. We thought TacticsII was stupid, but enjoyed Blitzkrieg, Guadalcanal, Jutland, Midway (we used the coiunters for those games for our own games of naval wars also).
And of course, every early DM used the map from Outdoor Survival.
I played some of those games as a teen, well before this thread was started. I loved the setup and learning, but rarely completed any of the games due to the time commitment and finding a group to play them.
I had an uncle plus some dads of friends that had several AH games, and thusly got to play many as a kid/teen that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford.
Afrika Korps
Air Assault on Crete (one of my favorites)
Diplomacy
Kingmaker
Dune
Air Force
Napoleon
Richtofens War
Starship Troopers
Tobruk (another favorite, played it dozens of times)
There was also a Buck Rogers themed game in a similar AH-style box, but I didn’t see it on the wiki list of their games…hmmm…
Latest original Avalon Hill game played: I managed to get six friends together for Advanced Civilization. When it lunchtime rolled around, nobody wanted to take a break so we played straight through. Ten hours after starting, we finished. I placed fourth and was thrilled. My fellow players were no slouches. That was about twelve years ago.
I am a big fan of Kingmaker too but that hasn’t hit the table since the century began.
We have a game store here in town that I have never been in, but I frequently drive past and see their sign outside. I believe they host game nights a few nights a week, probably D&D mostly, but I’m wondering if a place like that would be interested in the games or maybe hosting a game night for those games. It might at least be a way to get a group together to play.
This is actually not a bad idea. Come to think of it, I believe we have the same sort of thing here too. Not sure if that would work out with games requiring multiple days play, such as Third Reich, but certainly for games that can be wrapped up in say 8 hours.
I run “Mega Civilization” annually which is about 87% the same rules as Advanced Civilization. Later on they broke it into Western and Eastern halves and due to trademark issues it is now known as Western/Eastern Empires.
I played a lot of Avalon Hill’s board game based on the movie Platoon. I think we had their Gettysburg game, too, but we had a computer game that played like an Avalon Hill board game that I may be conflating. Nothing held a candle to Axis & Allies, though.
I was introduced to Diplomacy in an advanced history class in high school and have played it when I can ever since. We did do a few games here on the Dope. I won once, but some called shenanigans because multiple players abandoned the game. We should try again.
there for a while, Milton Bradley owned Axis and Allies and you could buy it in normal stores and one of my brother’s friends introduced us to it we got it for Christmas…
…we never finished awhile game because it took days to do a few turns and wed get bored or forget where we were and start over also we had FIFI of the free feline resistance movement who would snatch and move pieces and the atomic tom …my youngest brothers Himalayan and Persian fat fluffball of a cat…would roll (or pounce)off the cat perch and land in the middle of it all wiping it out …
I went to buy another copy and its 70 dollars… so were waiting for a PC version on steam to happen
When I was an early teen, my dad gave me a copy of Patton’s Best, a solitaire Sherman tank simulator, that I think he found dumpster-diving. I played the hell out of until we moved and I lost it.
I found a copy on eBay about 12 years ago that I spent $150 on and have similarly played the hell out of, although I haven’t touched it for a few years now. I’m feeling the urge to break it out and have a session or five.
Might have been this game, which was published by TSR (publishers of Dungeons & Dragons) in 1988, during the era in which an heir to the estate of the creator of Buck Rogers controlled TSR.
There was: Buck Rogers XXVC. As with the board game, it was also published by TSR, and again, when Lorraine Williams controlled the company. She engineered having TSR pay licensing rights for publishing Buck Rogers products to the Dille Family Trust, which benefited herself and her family members.