Wargames Magazine Index has now over 5000 entries

Several years ago I started an index of articles of all (miniature) wargaming magazines in my collection. It now has reached 5000 articles, but I still have a stack of magazines that were donated and I still have to enter. So the index will keep growing during the coming weeks and months.

My main motivation for compiling this index is for my own use. The wargaming literature has published so many scenarios, rules, campaigns ... over the years, I refer to them regularly for setting up my own wargames. Having a good index certainly helps in locating a specific article.

But I also think keeping an extensive library of wargaming magazines is worthwhile in itself. The history of our hobby needs to be documented, and this little project is a small contribution to that goal. Perhaps this view is coloured by my occupation as a research professor, but I honestly do think that building up a literature collection is an integral part of understanding where a specific field (in this case, wargaming) originated from and how it developed.

Granted, many wargaming magazines cannot be compared to academic publications, but even so,  they deserve to be archived, if not for the future gaming historian who wants to know where the dreaded "saving roll" came from, or when the first scenario on the battle of such-and-so was first published. Magazines are not the only source for this type of information (there are plenty of books and other types of publications as well), but they might help to establish timelines and give contextual information.

But anyway, back to the index. In case you are wondering what sort of information one can look up, you should go to the link above and experiment for yourself. But just to give a few examples ...

Here's a list of articles I wrote myself (filtering on the name of an author) ...

... and here are the articles that deal with the Waterloo campaign and have a scenario (filtering on both period and scenario) ...

... or the articles dealing with Frostgrave ...

... and here are the articles that have the random word "Faltenian" in the title (filtering on the occurance of a specific word in the title) ...

... and here are the 10 most popular periods (take with a grain of salt, since there are many subclassifications ...) ...

   ... and the 20 most prolific authors (also take with a grain of salt, since some periodicals favour some names) ...

... and a breakdown per magazine.

Hope this helps!