Now that we in the the older geek crowd have finished reminiscing about Original Dungeons & Dragons, how about SPI games? How many of you used to subscribe to Strategy & Tactics? Which were your faves?
Me, my favourite was World War II - grand strategic scale. I also played Sniper a lot - pretty much the opposite end of the scale to WWII, focusing on individual tactics in real-time simulation. Enjoyed WWI as well. Had Russian Civil War but couldn’t find people interested in playing it. Oil War sucked, of couse. And I enjoyed Napolean at Waterloo, but it wasn’t very accurate, since Houguemont always fell in the first round. Panzergruppe Guderian was a lot of fun. Sixth Fleet was interesting, since it reversed the usual pattern: attack, then move.
And of course, a great non-SPI game - Kingmaker by Avalon Hill.
So, what SPI games did you have?
p.s. - to help the young’uns understand this thread: a long time ago, children, computers were only found in universities and industries. They took up whole rooms! If you wanted to play a simulation game in your own house, you had to move the little paper counters around on a paper map, and roll dice, and stuff like that.
Now, run along to your fancy digital thingamjigs and let the old folks talk, okay?
I was a lifetime subscriber to Strategy & Tactics after I bought my subscription with “CA” somewhere around issue 40. I even bought the original S&Ts at auction, back when it was a newsletter, before it turned into a full-fledged magazine with “Crete” long about issue 18.
I even still have a reproduction of Dunnigan’s first game, done when he was a student at Columbia(?), called “Up Against the Wall MF.” SPI distributed free copies at one of the Origin conventions.
My favorite weird game was the one that replayed the assassination plot against Hitler, where you moved counters representing all the Nazi officers around a map of Berlin.
I wish I still had some of those games. Have you seen was War in the Pacific goes for on ebay? :eek:
Counting the ones I got in S&T and Ares, an incomplete list:
War of the Ring
Oil War
Starforce: Alpha Centauri
Arnhem
Bundeswher
Conquistador
Dixie
The Plot to Assassinate Hitler
American Revolution
Berlin '85
Demons
The Creature That Ate Sheboygan
Punic Wars
Albion: Land of Faerie
The Stainless Steel Rat
Paratroop
I had dozens of SPI games (admittedly many of them were from my S&T subscription). World War III was my first SPI game if I recall correctly. Invasion: America, the Modern Battles series, Sniper!, and StarForce: Alpha Centauri were a few favorites.
Too many to count. I have a soft spot for their monster games : Wacht am Rhein, Terrible Swift Sword, War in the East, War in Europe, etc. (I still have my games). I wish I could find someone to play To the Green Fields Beyond (battle of Cambrai, 1917) with. What I like the most about them is that, if the rules don’t make senses, you can tinker with them so that they can reflect the historical situation better.
I had almost all of those, plus WWI and WWII (both oversimplified, but fun) and a bunch of classics, like the Year of the Rat and the American Civil War. In the D&D thread I also mentioned Divine Right, which was a lot of fun.
[hijack]Dixie always bugged me, and not just because it was so lame. In one of the scenarios, the Confederacy was going to war with the People’s Rupublic of America. The implication that the northern states are quasi-pinko was insulting. Also who was the most prominent Southern politician in 1934? Was Roosevelt really more of a commie than Huey Long?[/hijack]
I thought they could have made a much better game out of THe Punic Wars if they had loosened the historical fidelity and opened the map to the entire Mediterranean. More of a multiplayer, Diplomacy-type game.
I have it also (and its companion Objective : Moscow. For me it had the feel of a monster quadrigame (but it could be played with several players instead of the usual two).
It was a simple game - very much a standard SPI game; attack, defense, and movement factors, standard turn sequences, zones of control, lines of supply, terrain modifiers for defense and movement, etc. Its main difference was its large size - when it came out it was physically one of SPI’s biggest games, although later “monster games” would overwhelm it.
I also had a copy of SS Amerika which was later developed by some former SPI staff. Basically the same idea except it was the Axis invading instead of the Red Menace.
I played Avalon Hill games like Battle of the Bulge; in college I got extra credit in my Political Science class by playing out WWIII using Yaquinto’s game Ultimatum.
I used to have a button around somewhere that said “SPI Died for Our Sins”. The first person I saw wearing one was Steve Jackson.
I still have a stack of SPI games somewhere but haven’t played any of them in well over a decade. I know I’ll leave some off, but my collection includes:
Battlefleet Mars
Freedom in the Galaxy
Invasion: America
Objective: Moscow
Outreach
Star Force: Alpha Centauri
Star Soldier
Swords and Sorcery
War in the Ice
The War of the Ring
and, of course
The Creature That Ate Sheboygan
Plus who knows how many Ares games. I never had an S&T subscription
Of course, this doesn’t include the games I have from Avalon Hill, Battleline, Chaosium, GDW, Metagaming, Victory Games or Yaquinto
“Ok. My fortified mountain engineer division attacks across a river hex into light woods against your supplied mechanized infantry division with support indirect artillery battalion. I have support tactical modifiers coming from my fighter-bomber unit, plus supply interdiction on the railway line into the hex. With the winter defense penalty for your mechanized, and blocked zone of control for the adjacent retreat path, plus fire suppression, this comes to…looks at combat card…7:2 odds…rolls die…a five…looks at table…‘NE’, no effect. Damn. Next hex, my corps of artillery supported light cavalry attacks…”
Avalon Hill faves:
John Carter, Warlord of Mars
Dune
Kingmaker
Air Assault on Crete
Tobruk
Air Force
Squad Leader
GDW games:
Europa series (Narvik, Fire in the East, Battle of Britain, etc)
And more S&T magazine than you can shake a ziplock baggy full of counters at.
Middle Earth was great, the package including War of the Ring along with Gondor and Sauron. But my favorite was Raid, which involved small combat units. I even went so far as to map out the neighborhood I grew up in on a sheet of hex paper and used the pieces and rules to simulate defending it against the Russkies. This was a couple years before the movie Red Dawn ripped off my idea.
oo oo!
Just remembered: The Fall of Rome
A solitaire in which the player tries to prevent the dissolution of the Empire. The barbarians, meanwhile, keep popping up and crashing the Pax Romana. Hours of fun.
