We used to play that once a year for a buddies birthday. Great game.
On math dude did a spreadsheet on his computer and won.
She was a real piece of work.
Among many of us D&D grognards, she gets referred to as “She Who Must Not Be Named.” My understanding is that she wasn’t a gamer, wasn’t interested in gaming, and didn’t like gamers.
I have a modest collection of Avalon Hill games that I have been collecting and playing for the last 35 years, but it’s really difficult to find someone to play with and if I did I’d have to relearn the endlessly complicated rules for them. Right now I don’t have time, but in the future I’d love to spend a few hours playing against someone who is also into those games.
Last time we called for a game a few years ago, it stalled at 6 players.
I’m pushing 50, and I associate most of those games with people who are older than I am. A friend of mine found out I liked to play them, and surprised he said, “I didn’t think you liked those games beacuse you don’t smoke like a chimney.” I used to play quite a few of those games when I was much, much yougner, in my teens actually, but the amount of time it takes to finish a game combined with the difficulty of finding other people interested in playing means I stopped playing them myself. I played one of those games last in 2005, I think it was a Stalingrad game, and we only played for about two hours and the game wasn’t finished when we called it quits.
I have the time and the money to play these games but not the inclination. I find the rules a bit fiddly and I don’t want to push our those stupid chits. There are a lot of games from the 80s I remember fondly, Starfleet Battles, Car Wars, Ogre, etc., etc, but I couldn’t stand to play them today.
I think her legacy deserves to be reexamined a bit. While her business practices ultimately led to the downfall of TSR, when she was brought aboard she saved the company. The truth is that Gygax and others weren’t very good at running a business, and TSR only lasted as long as it did because they were lucky enough to strike gold. By many accounts, Williams was pretty good to employees.
Possibly so, and I admit I have no first-hand knowledge.
Last night, I found this fairly long discussion from 2022 about her, on the RPGNet forums.
- Some people who were involved at TSR seem to feel that she wasn’t bad, and she went to bat for her employees, while others (including Allen Varney, who was a freelance game designer for TSR in that era) say that they’ve never known anyone from TSR who had a good thing to say about her. In particular, it seems like she frequently didn’t play well with the creative types (writers, artists, game developers) at the company.
- Most of the people involved in managing the company prior to her taking it over (Gygax, the Blume brothers) weren’t good at business decisions, and it seems like she was an upgrade in that area, at least in first, but some of her decisions (particularly continuing the distribution arrangement with Random House) led to TSR’s ultimate downfall. That said, it’s entirely possible that TSR would have collapsed years earlier if it had still been controlled by Gygax and the Blumes.
- It sounds like, even though she was a better businessperson than her predecessors, her management style was often petty and autocratic.
- She absolutely pushed for TSR licensing the Buck Rogers IP with her family’s trust (and possibly over-estimating the value of that IP, and its sales potential), which some see as self-dealing. Even though she was (apparently) sole owner of TSR after pushing Gygax and the Blumes out, it comes across (at least to me) as raiding one of your company’s coffers to enrich yourself and your family.
- It’s probably worth noting that neither Williams, nor the Blume brothers, have ever agreed to be interviewed about that era at TSR.