I earlier reported about the importance of The Tin Soldier for Belgian wargaming, a shop started by Rudi Geudens almost 4 decades ago. A full story of the shop can be read here. I also have written many posts about some of the Gedemco buildings, made and distributed by the same shop.
I rummaged through my archives and found an old flyer of The Tin Soldier (in Dutch), dated 1989, shown below. Nostalgia!
A few more images from the home-made Tactics II game shown yesterday. Eddy told me he also penciled in names of city, inspired by names of cities in The Lord of The Rings, but these are hardly visible ...
Back in the early 80s, when I just started into wargaming, it was very hard for a teenager without a significant budget to acquire a lot of board wargames. Belgium wasn't exactly in the centre of wargaming activity at the time, although they were a few shops were you could buy wargames. Availability was one thing, price another.
One of the solutions was to copy wargames. Copying the rulebook was easy in a copyshop (which were plentiful at the time), but counters had to be made, and maps either photocopied and coloured in, or drawn from scratch. I remember making copies of the famous Rise and Decline of the Third Reich, using a lot of cardboard, letraset and coloured paint. Sadly, I threw all these handmade games out when I had enough money to buy all those games myself.
My longtime wargaming friend Eddy S., didn't throw them out so easily, so I was pleasantly surprised when he showed his handmade copy of Tactics II (copied from my original game), dating back to our high school days.
Another interesting fact showed up, as can be seen from the photographs above. For some reason, he always assumed the game had to be played with Red and Blue rotated 90 degrees on the board. This was one of those weird consequences of copying the game, but not having a faithful 100% copy - some labels or indications on the map were forgotten. It never occurred to me one could play Tactics II in this manner (I did play other variants, such as placing the sea borders next to each other for an invasion-style game), but it does look like an interesting variant.
Last week (November 11) Rudi Geudens passed away.
Although I didn't know Rudi very well personally, I always had a chat with him during our many encounters at the various wargaming conventions in Belgium when we met each other.
Rudi's influence on the wargaming hobby in Belgium was very significant. The story of how he started wargaming, and the founding of his wargaming shop "The Tin Soldier" in Sint-Niklaas is nicely detailed on his webpages he wrote many years ago.
It is because of The Tin Soldier I first came into contact with wargaming as a hobby. It must have been in 1980 or 1981 when I saw a large display of games of the wargaming club in Sint-Niklaas held in the local shopping mall. It piqued my interest immediately, and when I came back home, I tried to recreate my own wargame using cheap plastic toy soldiers and some components from war-themed boardgames I had lying around.
The shop in Sint-Niklaas was a mecca for me. Living in Leuven (my grandparents lived in Sint-Niklaas), I didn't belong to the local club, but I tried to visit the shop as often as I could. I bought several board wargames there, I bought my first miniatures there, I bought my first miniature ruleset there (Warhammer 1st edition, no less), my first polyhedral dice, and so many more things. As a teenager, I even once made the trip from Leuven to Sint-Niklaas (50 km one way) by bicycle, so money for the train ticket could be saved for buying wargame stuff.
Later on, during the late 90s, when my Leuven wargaming group became regular visitors and game organizers of the CRISIS wargames show in Antwerp, I bumped into Rudi again. It was always inspiring to have a chat with him, about wargaming, life, the universe.
During our last chat (before Corona), he told me he was ill, but he was positive and told me prospects were good. We didn't meet again due to the Corona crisis.
Rudi showed the way for many wargamers in Belgium. He really was the godfather of Belgian wargaming. We will miss him.
Under normal circumstances, today would have been the highlight of my wargaming year. This would have been the day CRISIS 2021 was supposed to happen, but we all know why we don't have a CRISIS for the 2nd consecutive year.
Hopefully there will be a CRISIS in 2022!
Last week I finished reading the latest book by Jon Peterson, Game Wizards. I enjoyed reading his previous books, Playing at the World, and The Elusive Shift, so I was looking forward to this title as well.
It chronicles the early days of TSR - publishers of Dungeons and Dragons - during the 70s and 80s. It's the story about how a new game format (the original D&D) led to starting a company to publish that game. Sadly, the story isn't a happy one. Soon, the company is quagmired in all sorts of lawsuits, ending with its sale to Wizards of the Coast in the mid 90s.
I only started 'gaming' somewhere around 1981 with Avalon Hill wargames, and picked up my first roleplaying game in 1983 or 1984. So I didn't experience the early days of D&D and TSR firsthand, but over the years I read about many of the stories. As a gamer in the late 80s, TSR didn't have a good reputation at all in the gaming circles I frequented. We didn't consider (A)D&D a game worthy or our sophisticated needs. Companies such as Chaosium (Call of Cthulhu, Runequest, ...), Games Workshop (Warhammer, ...), FASA (Battletech, ...), ICE (Rolemaster, ...) were showing us the light. Although I did buy the occasional (A)D&D product, I never participated in a campaign. "D&D? Who still plays that these days?". This was also the time TSR was always written as T$R on internet forums such as rec.games.frp. I guess the zeitgeist was against them. This changed somewhat when AD&D 2nd edition was published, but by then, my roleplaying preferences had firmly developed. Then in 1993 Magic The Gathering was published, and I guess TSR never really could cope with that paradigm shift.
Anyway, all this to say that over the past decades, I never held TSR in high regard. Some of their products were cool, but overall, it was never my "go-to company" for my gaming needs. I of course did admire the creative genius of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, but it sort of was always blurred by all the stories about the lawsuits. Only during the past 10 years or so, with an increased interest into the real origins of our hobby (as opposed to propaganda), the true story is seeing the light of day. But what about the book? It is an enjoyable read for anyone interested in the history of roleplaying during the 70s, although most if not all of the content is about the history of the company, and not so much about the history of the game (both other books by Jon Peterson do a much better job at that).
So what did I learn?
First of all, creating a game is something different from publishing a game is something different from running a small company is something different from running a big company. I think the history of TSR illustrates this very well, with the original designers quickly hitting their limits about what they can do successfully - they can design games (Arneson probably contributed the most), they can edit and publish a game (Gygax did most of the work here), but they miserably failed at running a company. And once large amounts of money became involved, the whole enterprise quickly dissolved in petty fights.
Second, a company should stay focused on its core products. Gygax spending large amounts of time in California trying to start up a D&D movie does seem extravagant even back then when they were riding the wave of success. What was he thinking? The only thing that came out of it was a childish cartoon show, IMO far removed from what the game really is.
Third, I was surprised that even in such a toxic atmosphere, any creative work was done at all. So there must have been something in the air that made many of the creative writers putting heir heart and soul in TSR products.
As I said, a good book. Now I am waiting for the book on the history of Games Workshop, written by Ian Livingstone. Hopefully not too long ...
