Anodyne
Friday, August 24, 2007
 









Various simulation games I either played or owned c. 1977-82. Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival and Afrika Corps are older games from the early 1970s that I discovered on the windowledge of Brian Herrin's Grade 4 Caulfeild Elementary classroom. The other games are SPI titles from the early 1980s, two of which came as inserts in my subscription copies of Ares magazine. Most of these titles didn't really lend themselves to solo play, and the few friends I did have weren't about to spend hours rolling dice and shuffling tiny cardboard counters around on the flimsy paper or cardstock maps. Simulation gaming was thus, for me, an early introduction to the assuming-you're-going-to-have-a-better-time-than-you're-actually-having phenomena that plagues me to this day. By 1984 or so I had a massive collection of games, easily 50 or more, including obscure and virtually unplayable titles like The Plot to Assassinate Hitler and After The Holocaust ("Keynesian macroeconomics after the nukes fall"), whose cardboard counters were carefully stacked in pastel-colored styrofoam egg cartons precariously perched on my bedroom's bookshelves. Common sense only took over in the mid-1980s, as my interests shifted toward hiking, comic book collecting, and prog-rock record accumulating.
- posted by cjb @ 2:54 PM


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