HOW I BECAME A WARGAME PUBLISHER
In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman catalogues the childhood signs of coming greatness in the lives of dozens of creators. Looking back on my adolescence there were many signs. I loved boardgames and magazines. These were like bulletins from beyond the horizon of my circumscribed suburban existence. At the age of 13, I started studying the "Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation" published in the back of magazines, usually in the December issue. Why would I need to know about that if I wasn’t already on my way to work in the publishing industry?
Original Map: D-Day (Avalon Hill)
I found an advertisement from The Avalon Hill Company for their title, D-Day. So I set out to create my own copy of it. This entailed creating a hex grid. Have you ever hand-drawn a hex grid? It’s rather labor intensive. When I finished my grid I took it to the local blueprint company for reproduction. There was no Kinko’s in those days. Then I set about copying the D-Day map from the ad. I drew in the coastline, the rivers, and got some Letraset pressure-sensitive lettering sheets and filled-in all the names on the map, one letter at a time.
The rules to the original AH classics were subpar. I spent a lot of time trying to perfect them, which meant reconceptualizing not just rewriting. The rules were very hit-or-miss and left out many important concepts. In fact, I almost gave up on ever playing Afrika Korps because of the missing explanations. On vacations with my family, I spent the endless hours on the road thinking about this problem.
I was developing skills that I would need as a wargame designer and publisher. I created map extensions for AH’s Afrika Korps, extending the map to Alexandria and the Nile on one side, and almost to Tunisia on the other side. I subscribed to AH's The General. This was in the “warring clubs,” era. I joined a club run by Dana Lombardy, but we both realized we had less interest in running the club than in publishing our own games. So Dana started Conflict magazine and I became the first editor. At about this time I read Decline and Fall, by Otto Friedrich, one of the top editors of the original Saturday Evening Post. The book is a description of all the mistakes that one can make in publishing a magazine.
From Conflict magazine I moved on to SPI in New York. I received a job offer from SPI while still working with Lombardy. It certainly occurred to me that their motivation for offering me the job was to torpedo the competition, and it began to look bad when I arrived in New York to find that the job I was offered, with the title of Managing Editor, had just been given to JFD’s girlfriend, Mary Elizabeth Clifford. But I decided to stick with it and eventually Beth moved on to greener pastures, and I took over the Editorial position.
At SPI I learned all I needed to know about print production. I worked with the printer, with editors, graphic designers and even some of the distributors. When I left SPI in January of 1977, I knew all the ropes. I also knew where all the best ideas in wargame design were located. The hobby had taken huge strides in the years since SPI had been founded in 1969, and I was ready to create my first independent design, Napoleon at Bay, originally published in 1978.