Old Stuff

Wargames!

G. Thomas Fitzpatrick of Verus Ratio kindly points us to an article on wargaming in National Review.

I subscribed to SPI's Strategy & Tactics back in 1978 or 79; I think the first game I received was Tannenbaum. Later favorites were the Allied invasion of Sicily in WW2, Russians invade China, and a game that I think was named The Battle for Berlin. Sometime in my college years I bought Terrible Swift Sword, SPI's superb simulation of the entire battle of Gettysburg, and the granddaddy of all Civil War simulations. Like Mr. Fitzgerald, I was more interested in the potential of a battle rather than working through all the details of the fight: I'd spend lots of time setting up various scenarios while poring through stacks of reference books on the battles.

During my, ah, underemployment phase after college and the collapse of the Cold War, some friends and I discovered GDW's Air Superiority/Air Strike games and became regular air combat fanatics. These gaming systems were quite detailed simulations of reality: in late 1990 we used the Air Strike system to study air-to-ground warfare in the Middle East while Operation Desert Shield was in progress. After that I wanted to start working on computing optimal paths through air defense networks, but real life intervened and I got a daytime job.

The Air Superiority/Air Strike systems are still in development - see the mailing list here and webpages here, here and here.