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Friday, March 16, 2007

WHEN STEVE COLE STARTED PLAYING WARGAMES

The president of ADB Inc. played his first game in 1963, and published his first game in 1971.
It was a very different time.
In 1963, there was only one wargame publisher, Avalon Hill, and they did one or two games a year.
Every game came in a box with a mounted board.
Counters were always pink and blue.
Rulebook? Hah. The rules were printed on a single large sheet of paper and folded to fit into the box.
There was only one kind of game (what would now be called strategic boardgames) and only one combat results table which worked the same in every game. A few years later, a second combat results table appeared in which it was no longer possible for attackers that had twice the combat power of the defense to be destroyed by the attack, and the world rejoiced.
A few new games that were not the same rules with a different map started to appear, including the first navy and air force games.
There were no rule numbers in those "bedsheet" rules, and no cross referencing. It could take hours to find the rules that "everybody remembered was in there somewhere". In more than one case, a game had to be suspended until the next saturday (left set up on a table in somebody's living room) while everyone researched the rules "bedsheet". It took is four days to find the rule that prevented German fighters from attacking Allied bombers in the map-edge set up hexes of the game Luftwaffe.
There was no internet and the only magazine was the Avalon Hill General. The only sense of "community" was that you could place a free ad looking for opponents in the General (and get a ton of junk mail for your reward).

By 1965, Steve Cole was designing his own games for playing with the local game club, most of which which were (thankfully) never published. There was no way to buy sheets of hex paper so before a new game could be designed, he had to draw each hex with a T-square and triangles. There were no photocopiers available until about 1970, so every game map had to be drawn separately.

By 1971, there were maybe half a dozen real publishers, but there were a hundred amateur publishers.
Wargamers hungry for new games and innovative ideas were willing to accept lower production standards.
Die cut counters were too hard for little amateur companies to make, so they published the counters on sheets of colored paper which wargames had to spray-glue to whatever cardboard they could find.
Maps came as 8.5x11 pages gamers had to tape together.
The counter symbols were drawn with drafting instruments and the combat factors were lettered by hand. Maps were, mostly, drawn by hand. It would be almost a decade before rub-on lettering and sheets of "cut out and stick down terrain" revolutionized graphics. It would be 1976 before you could buy sheets of hex paper with hex numbers. The SFB maps published in 2003 used a sheet of hex paper published by GDW in 1976 and purchased at Origins #2. This same sheet of hex paper is still on file at ADB and is still used.