LINDA MOSCA

SPI Staff Panel, 1976 — (left to right): JFD, unidentified, J.A. Nelson (slouching), KZ (hat, beard), Linda, unknown, Redmond (wise cracking), Ginny Mulholland, Isby, Costikyan, Berg, Barasch. Behind Linda: Milkuhn. At the dias, a traffic barrier, to avoid overrun by disgruntled grognards.

During the summer of 1975, Jack Greene, a game designer with the small company Simulations Design Corporation, visited the three largest American wargame manufacturers, Games Designers Workshop, Avalon Hill, and Simulations Publications Inc. (SPI). He was interested in getting their opinions on the current state of board wargaming, which he published in Issue 71 of Campaign.^[1] During his visits, the only woman he was able to talk to who was employed in a creative role at any of the three companies was Linda Mosca, who was designing her first wargame for SPI at the time of his visit. During her interview, Mosca championed the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons published by TSR, noting that it could be a gateway for more women to play tabletop games.^[2]

The previous year, Linda Mosca had been on the production staff of SPI's house magazine Strategy & Tactics.^[3] A year later, at a time when the industry was dominated by men, Mosca was commissioned by SPI to design a game.^[4] Her first game, the one being designed during Greene's visit, was Battle of the Wilderness: Gaining the Initiative. It was subsequently published by SPI in 1975 as one of four wargames packaged together in the "quadrigame" Blue & Gray II.^[5] The tactical game, which simulates the Battle of the Wilderness during the American Civil War, made Mosca the wargame industry's first professional female board wargame designer.^[6]

By the time she was interviewed by Greene, Mosca had already published an article titled "Women in Wargaming" in the February–March 1975 issue of Moves in which she concluded "I would like to remind women wargamers that while they are fewer in numbers, they make equally effective generals. That war is a man's domain is disproven by the fact that its wellsprings are societal and outcome affects all, regardless of gender. That history belongs to men is disproven by the few accounts of great women that filtered down, even as recorded by male historians. Remember, of the three persons most feared by Rome, two were women (Cleopatra & Zenobia)."^[7]

After the publication of Battle of the Wilderness, Mosca designed Thirty Years War: Rocroi (1975), and co-designed two other games: Gondor: The Siege of Minas Tirith (1976) with Richard Berg; and King Arthur (1979) with Richard Mosca.^[8] She was also on the production teams for Strike Force One (1975), Chinese Farm (1975), War in the West (1976), Terrible Swift Sword (1976), and Russian Civil War 1918-1922 (1976).^[9]