Strategy & Tactics - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Strategy & Tactics is a wargaming

Wargaming

A wargame is a strategy game that deals with military operations of various types, real or fictional. Wargaming is the hobby dedicated to the play of such games, which can also be called conflict simulations, or consims for short. When used professionally to study warfare, it is generally known as...

magazine

Magazine

Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...

now published by Decision Games

Decision Games

Decision Games is a wargaming company, founded by Christopher Cummins, that publishes Strategy & Tactics magazine. The company has bought the rights to many Simulations Publications, Inc...

, notable for publishing a complete new wargame in each issue.

Beginnings

Strategy & Tactics began life in 1966 as a wargaming fanzine

Fanzine

A fanzine is a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon for the pleasure of others who share their interest...

published by Chris Wagner (then a staff sergeant

Staff Sergeant

Staff sergeant is a rank of non-commissioned officer used in several countries.The origin of the name is that they were part of the staff of a British army regiment and paid at that level rather than as a member of a battalion or company.-Australia:...

with the US Air Force in Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

), at first in Japan, then moving to the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

with Wagner. It was intended as independent competition to the Avalon Hill

Avalon Hill

Avalon Hill was a game company that specialized in wargames and strategic board games. Its logo contained its initials "AH", and it was often referred to by this abbreviation. It also published the occasional miniature wargaming rules, role-playing game, and had a popular line of sports simulations...

house magazine The General

The General Magazine

The General Magazine was first published in 1964, as a bi-monthly periodical devoted to supporting Avalon Hill's line of wargames, with articles on game tactics, history, and industry news...

.

Although popular with wargaming fans, the magazine ran into financial trouble in 1969, and Jim Dunnigan

Jim Dunnigan

James F. Dunnigan is an author, military-political analyst, Defense and State Department consultant, and wargame designer currently living in New York City, notable for his matter-of-fact approach to military analysis.-Career:...

agreed to take it over, founding Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) to publish S&T.

A persistent rumour that Dunnigan had purchased S&T from Wagner for one dollar, and that furthermore the dollar was not paid until much later was confirmed by Wagner during an interview printed in S&T issue #83 (The Kaiser's Battle).

Dunnigan era

Dunnigan made some radical changes. Starting with issue 18, each issue contained a complete new wargame; the first game was Crete. Not only did this represent a break from the cautious policy of Avalon Hill

Avalon Hill

(pioneer company in modern commercial wargaming and the leading company in the fledgling wargaming industry) in publishing only one or two games per year (for fear of new games cannibalizing sales of old ones), but the need for new game designs spurred research into many of the lesser-known corners of military history. Despite the diversity in themes, the style of the games was fairly consistent. They predominantly used a hexgrid for the maps and many rule concepts such as zones of control

Zone of control

In board wargames, zones of control represent the tiles adjacent to tiles occupied by objects. For example, in hexagonal tiled maps, the six hexagons adjacent to the hexagon occupied by a unit would be considered to be in its "zone of control."...

were repeated in many games.

In addition to the games, the magazine featured many articles on military history, many of them notable for applying modern quantitative analysis to battles that had traditionally been described in a narrative "heroic" style.

Avalon Hill

Avalon Hill

continued to produce more than just wargames, priding itself on other themes, such as party games, sports titles, and children's games. Dunnigan's focus remained primarily on military history, and he felt that there was a market for detailed historical articles as an accompaniment to detailed and accurate games. (A single experiment in using the S&T game format to explore the use of strategy and tactics in professional sports, Scrimmage, in issue #37, was not repeated.) S&T now embarked on providing six new games a year, and at a much lower cost per game than was to be found elsewhere, with the magazine itself almost being a bonus. There was no middleman in the form of a local games store; subscribers got their games delivered right to their homes. Circulation of the magazine was substantial and games that might not otherwise sell went to subscribers automatically, eclipsing expected independent sales of most titles. SPI also benefited from having the magazine as an advertising vehicle for boxed (i.e. non-magazine) games, sold directly or through local games stores.

Greg Costikyan

Greg Costikyan

Greg Costikyan, sometimes known under the pseudonym "Designer X" , is an American game designer and science fiction writer.Costikyan's career spans nearly all extant genres of gaming, including hex-based wargames, role-playing games, boardgames, card games, computer games, online games and mobile...

, in an online opinion article dated 1996, remarked that

It is hard to overemphasize the importance of S&T to the history of wargaming; indeed, the rise and fall of the hobby can virtually be correlated with the rise and fall of S&T. SPI's staff freely discussed future plans, down to details of marketing and distribution, in the pages of the magazine; its subscribers began to feel a personal stake in the company's survival, going so far as to write long letters of advice and volunteering time and effort to help the company survive. The historical articles were of the highest quality, and quite unlike anything being published in the historical magazines of the period, since SPI, befitting its gaming orientation, tried to quantify almost everything, providing copious tables of comparative data on, for instance, the merits of World War II-era tanks. Other journals tended to be far more descriptive. As a result, S&T acquired a readership even among military history devotees who had no interest in the games.

S&T's circulation exceeded that of Avalon Hill's The General

The General Magazine

The General Magazine was first published in 1964, as a bi-monthly periodical devoted to supporting Avalon Hill's line of wargames, with articles on game tactics, history, and industry news...

by the mid 1970s, improving its physical appearance dramatically under the guidance of Redmond Simonsen. (SPI's non-magazine games were improving by leaps and bounds also - their first games were made in black and white on regular paper; counters were simple coloured paper that had to be cut out and glued to cardboard by the purchaser. Rules were not done in booklet form, but on large sheets of paper folded to letter-size as a cost-savings measure. There were no costs incurred, then, for cutting, collating or binding - nor for boxes or counter trays.) As die-cut counters, printed on both sides in full colour, became the norm, they were included in the magazine games, as were two color and finally full color maps.

S&T eventually made its magazine games available for purchase in stores with standard boxes, dice and counter trays, and also sold boxes and counter trays separately for the convenience of subscribers who wanted to store their subscriber game components in something other than the envelope the magazine had been delivered in.

By the mid 1970's, SPI's annual income rose to the 6 figure range, with paid staff numbering as many as forty people, and with 40+ games being produced through both the magazine and boxed sales annually. Competition began to spring up, with many new companies appearing in the mid to late 1970s. Wargaming was reaching its high water mark, just as the release of Squad Leader

Squad Leader

thumb|Squad Leader game package.Squad Leader is a tactical level board wargame originally published by Avalon Hill in 1977. It was designed by Hall of Fame game designer John Hill and focuses on infantry combat in Europe during World War II...

by Avalon Hill

Avalon Hill

took the wargaming world by storm (eventually resulting in an unprecedented 200,000 copies sold). Such faith was placed in the future of the industry that a Game Designer's Guild was even created, in the hope that it just might be possible to earn a comfortable living providing wargames to the public.

Dunnigan's departure

However, despite annual income declared at two million dollars, SPI's sales declined, and while monetary income remained constant, increasing inflation eroded the company's profits. Dunnigan's departure in the late 1970s led to internal struggle at SPI in 1980; chief among SPI's problems was poor marketing. Howie Barasch's departure as marketing manager in the late 1970s was never properly rectified and the founder of S&T, Chris Wagner, who was now a management consultant, was brought back into the fold to address SPI's marketing problems. He found that many sales representatives, previously independently commissioned by SPI, had no idea they were still representing the company and some didn't even realize the company was still in operation, as no one had been in touch with them for several years.

TSR

Financial mismanagement also cost SPI money, and a recession

Recession

In economics, a recession is a business cycle contraction, a general slowdown in economic activity. During recessions, many macroeconomic indicators vary in a similar way...

didn't help matters. Negotiations began with Avalon Hill

Avalon Hill

and then TSR, Inc.

TSR, Inc.

Blume and Gygax, the remaining owners, incorporated a new company called TSR Hobbies, Inc., with Blume and his father, Melvin Blume, owning the larger share. The former assets of the partnership were transferred to TSR Hobbies, Inc....

for a buy-out.

From Greg Costikyan:

TSR indicated initial interest, and SPI, desperate for cash, asked for the loan of a few thousand dollars to meet its payroll. TSR agreed, requiring that the loan be backed by SPI's assets, making it a secured creditor. Shortly after SPI paid its employees, TSR demanded repayment of the loan. SPI agreed to be taken over by TSR, for no cash money.

TSR sent out a press release announcing that they had taken over SPI. Soon, however, they realized the extent of SPI's liabilities; and, horrified, "clarified" their own initial announcement, claiming that, instead, they had assumed SPI's assets but not its debts.

Now, while TSR had been a secured creditor, it was a tiny one. SPI's printers and the venture capital investors were owed far more money. Legally, TSR's position gave them first crack at SPI's assets, but hardly entitled them to take over the company, lock, stock, and barrel, without assuming any liabilities. However, no one in SPI's management was going to sue over the ownership of a bankrupt company, and TSR's takeover seemed the only shot at keeping the company together. And TSR quickly paid off the major creditors, at some cents on the dollar, to avoid the possibility that anyone else would challenge the transaction.

By the time of the buyout in 1982, SPI was selling, it is estimated, some 60-70% of all wargames in the world. Avalon Hill

Avalon Hill

remained a bigger company, but only because it sold many more sports and general interest games than wargames. By this point, S&T boasted 30,000 subscribers and the magazine was truly the flagship of SPI.

The popularity of S&T reached the point where SPI began publishing a second magazine, Moves, that consisted primarily of articles on winning strategies for playing SPI games and additional scenarios for them. A third magazine, Ares, devoted to science-fiction and fantasy games and including one in each issue, was also published for a time.

One innovation of S&T was its feedback system, in which readers could answer various multiple-choice questions on a return card, whose data would then be entered into a Burroughs minicomputer

Minicomputer

A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...

for analysis. Thus S&T always had good information about which games readers were looking for.

Again, from Greg Costikyan:

Perhaps S&T's most important innovation...was its feedback system. Using primitive Burroughs, later IBM, minicomputers, Dunnigan put together a highly sophisticated system to obtain marketing information from his customers. In every issue of the magazine, there was a response card, with 96 numbered blanks. At the back of the magazine were a series of questions, to which a reader could respond by entering a number between 0 and 9 on the blanks of the card. Some questions provided marketing data, e.g., average age of the readership; some were used to provide competitive rankings of SPI's and other publishers' products, charts that S&T's readers pored over when deciding what game to buy next. And some were used to ask the readers what kinds of games they'd like to see. Indeed, every issue provided brief write-ups of game ideas, and SPI would design the games which received the highest ratings.

This kind of market research was astonishing for the field, remains astonishing for the field, would be astonishing in any field. SPI had immediate, timely data telling it precisely what its most valued customers thought. For years, the sales of SPI's games correlated very closely with the feedback results; SPI could predict, with virtual certainty, a game's sales before embarking on its design.

Through this feedback, it became obvious that S&Ts readership included many of the avid wargamers - over 50% of readers claimed to own 100 or more games; many bought a dozen games every year on top of those contained in the magazine. SPI estimated that 250,000 people in North America had ever bought a wargame based on the total number of games sold by all companies to date, and felt that its subscribers probably owned a disproportionate share of those games. In other words, these subscribers were the key market audience for the entire wargaming industry. And SPI had its finger on their pulse through the feedback system in S&T.

However, in at least one instance, the readers' feedback was disregarded. SPI sometimes published games exploring hypothetical—sometimes seemingly far-fetched—conflicts such as warfare in the United States following an all-out nuclear war, or what might happen if the Soviet Union and/or the People's Republic of China attempted to invade the United States under some set of circumstances. In 1978 a proposal for another "what if? game titled Case Geld, a game that explored the ways that Germany might have been able to attempt to invade North America during World War II, scored very high in feedback but was not published because a faction within the magazine staff felt that the subject encouraged "fascist fantasizing". The decision was discussed in one of the magazine's regular opening features ("Big Tsimmis"), but SPI did not publish the game. Games on the subject of a hypothetical German attempt to land somewhere in North America were subsequently published by other companies. The original 'Case Geld' design was eventually published by 3W in 1990, under the title 'SS Amerika'. The designer notes include a history of the argument at S&T.

When TSR took over SPI, it made a colossal blunder: it refused to honour commitments to the dedicated S&T subscribers. SPI unfortunately had no assets to its name when the takeover occurred, but there were over 1,000 subscribers who had made a significant payment (in c. 1978 terms) for a "lifetime subscription" to S&T, meaning that they were entitled to all future issues without any further payment. These subscribers were informed that their subscriptions would not be honored. People who had placed pre-release, paid, orders for certain games that had been in development were informed that they would receive neither the game they had paid for nor a refund of the money they had paid for it. TSR saved money in the short term, but alienated its best customers.

Greg Costikyan claims that this was the turning point in the wargaming industry; few S&T subscribers renewed, even though the magazine continued to be published (TSR published issues 91 through 111); many also refused to buy any TSR titles due to bitterness over the handling of their subscriptions.

SPI's design staff moved on to Avalon Hill, where they set up a subsidiary company based in New York called Victory Games. It produced many unique and popular titles, which by the late 1980s were outselling even Avalon Hill

Avalon Hill

games. TSR continued making games, hoping to recoup its investment in SPI (another reason was the enthusiasm of some staff members for wargaming), but despite a healthier distribution chain than SPI had enjoyed, its wargame line was never successful. S&T Magazine was eventually sold to 3W

3W (company)

World Wide Wargames, or 3W, was a wargame company founded in 1977 by Keith Poulter. Originally launched in England, the company moved later to California. In addition to producing boxed wargames, 3W published the magazine The Wargamer before taking charge of the magazine Strategy & Tactics...

, a small company which published The Wargamer magazine, a direct competitor. By this time, other companies were also stepping up production, and a splintered market ensured that the days of selling 50,000 copies or more of a title were gone. Publishers became happy to sell 10,000 copies, with 20,000 being considered phenomenal.

3W

It was during this decline that 3W

3W (company)

continued its publication of S&T (specifically issues 112 to 139), and James Dunnigan returned for a brief stint as editor of the magazine (Keith Poulter was the editor from issues #112 to #119, Ty Bomba from #120 to #129, James Dunnigan from #130 to #139). Although circulation began to increase again, subscriptions never recovered fully, and most sales were through game stores and not subscriptions, which meant third party retailers cut into profits. Sales were also no longer guaranteed. Keith Poulter, the head of 3W and founder of The Wargamer

The Wargamer (magazine)

The Wargamer was a magazine devoted to the hobby of board wargaming. It was founded by Keith Poulter and published six times a year by World Wide Wargames , Although initially it was only published four times a year....

, sold the magazine to Decision Games

Decision Games

Decision Games is a wargaming company, founded by Christopher Cummins, that publishes Strategy & Tactics magazine. The company has bought the rights to many Simulations Publications, Inc...

, who continued publication beginning with issue 140. (Fire & Movement

Fire & Movement

Fire & Movement: The Forum of Conflict Simulation was founded by Rodger MacGowan in 1975, and began publication the following year. The magazine is devoted to covering games from a variety of manufacturers, specializing in wargames, both traditional board wargames and also computer wargames Fire &...

was already being published concurrently by Decision Games.) Issue 176 saw S&T introduced for sale at newsstands, minus the game, and according to the official website "by issue #216, more copies of the magazine edition were being produced than the game edition." As S&T approaches its 40th year as a conventional magazine rather than a "fanzine" type publication, it lays claim to being the longest published wargame magazine.

S&T has also survived many of its competitors. Among the latter was Command, which also came with a complete game in each issue, and which was created by Bomba when he left 3W. Bomba named his publishing company XTR (as in "Cross The River"), a reference to Julius Caesar's decision to cross the Rubicon which he used in this case regarding his future relationship with Dunnigan and 3W upon leaving S&T. However, Dunnigan is long-gone, S&T is no longer published by 3W, and the masthead of the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of S&T (Number 253) lists Bomba as assistant editor and as one of the magazine's four copy editors.

Awards and value

Strategy & Tactics won thirteen Charles S. Roberts

Charles S. Roberts Award

The Charles S. Roberts Awards are given annually for excellence in the historical wargaming hobby. It is named after Charles S. Roberts the "Father of Wargaming" who founded Avalon Hill. The award is informally called a "Charlie" and officially called a "Charles S...

/Origins Award

Origins Award

The Origins Awards are American awards for outstanding work in the game industry. They are presented by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design at the Origins Game Fair on an annual basis for the previous year, so the 1979 awards were given at the 1980 Origins.The Origins Award is commonly...

s between 1974 and 2009, and in 1997 the magazine was inducted into the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame

Hall of Fame

A hall of fame, wall of fame, walk of fame, walk of stars or avenue of stars is a type of attraction established for any field of endeavor to honor individuals of noteworthy achievement in that field...

.

Back issues of Strategy & Tactics are highly valued by wargame collectors, and some have become quite expensive. S&T magazine games that have not been played and have counter sheets intact ("unpunched") are worth much more than played ("punched") games.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.