What was the first board-based wargame you owned?

[Iron Mike USMC]

What was the first war board game you owned? Not the first one you played, but the first one you went out to buy, or was given to you.

Me, my first board game was Panzer Blitz. Got it as a birthday present on my 13th birthday. The giver and I immediately opened it and started to play and learn. PB, is still one of my favorites today.

 

[Fenrir]

Mine was Panzer Leader.....and yes, i immediatly opened it and started to learn to play it. and yes, I also think that it as well as Panzerblitz are still outstanding games.

 

[PanzerElite]

My first game was AH "Blitzkrieg", then "Afrika Korps" and "Battle of the Bulge"....that was back in 1977. The great thing is that most of the early AH titles are a great place to start anyway.

 

[Iron Mike USMC]

Between AH and SPI, I'll take AH any day of the week. Their games, were much more accessible than the SPI monoliths. I admit I was war game junky in the 70's and 80's, buying even the huge SPI game covering the European theater, from Norway to North Afrika, and Portugal to the Urals. Never had a room big enough to lay out all of the maps at the same time.

I even purchased a few Yaquinto and Steve Jackson games (the ones that came in zip-locks.

 

[Jim H. Moreno]

I started off simple: Battleship, Stratego, and Chess. I did buy Shogun when it came out.

 

[ericmwalters]

My first wargame

First wargame I ever bought was Avalon Hill's original MIDWAY game. I was a sophomore in high school and a ship modeler back in 1974. A trip to the hobby store for my next acquisition of a Tamiya 1:700 scale Waterline series Japanese cruiser and a couple destroyers saw me spot the game on the shelf...I'd never seen it before. I'd had mock battles on the rec room floor with my ships, but to have an actual game! It seemed too cool. Skipped buying the destroyers, bought MIDWAY for $6.50, the IJN cruisier TONE kit and went home to check out what I'd gotten.

Of course, my first gaming session with a buddy of mine saw us completely misunderstand the rules. It took a lot of practice before we really figured out how to play according the rules (and yet more practice to begin to play well!). But we were hooked.

I hardly built any more model ships after that. That Christmas, I got PANZERBLITZ, THIRD REICH, RICHTHOFEN'S WAR (Avalon Hill) and SPI's FAST CARRIERS. I went to the Strategic Games Club meetings at my high school where I could play PB and RW alongside the others fiddling with DIPLOMACY (which I came to love). When TOBRUK came out ($12.00!!!) we marvelled at it; it seemed to be the greatest tactical game of all. And so it began!

 

[trauth116]

War at Sea -- bought it at a Drug Store in Geneva Illinois ...

a week later I bought Wooden Ships and Iron Men at the same place -- it was 1978 - I was 14 and in 8th grade.

It went from there ... :horse:

 

[Gen_Electric]

First one I bought was AH Afrika Korp but I had played AH Gettysburg (old, with different size counters) with a buddy before that. And then there was this addiction, Midway, Tactics II, 1914, D-Day, Bulge, Stalingrad, Tobruk, Blitzkrieg, Jutland, France-1940, Waterloo, Anzio, Victory in the Pacific, Little Round Top, and I probably forgot some.

 

[moondog]

My first board game.......hmmm....

I would have to say the first one was a game by Hasbro (part of the Heritage Series) called Broadsides.....Each player had plastic ships (either red or blue) and they had detachable white sails.
In your turn, you could move one ship in a straight line as many "open" spots as you wanted. To score a hit you just had to end up adjacent to an enemy ship. There were also 4 shore batteries.....2 on an island and 2 on the land at the edges.....all of them across the middle. 2 batteries said MISS on the bottom and 2 said HIT.

That would be what we call now a "Beer and Pretzels" game.

My first serious game that I owned was Wooden Ships & Iron Men....and then the addiction took over like it did for most of you.
Tobruk, Wellington's Victory, Russian Campaign, Waterloo, Terrible Swift Sword, Bloody April, A Gleam of Bayonets.....and on and on and on.

And let's not forget Strategy & Tactics Magazine....with games included. Oh yeah, I had the addiction bad.......and my Mom and Dad would just look at me and shake their heads.....wondering "Where did they go wrong"

dog

 

[chrisvalla]

Mine was Luftwaffe... of course at 6, the rules weren't all that clear, but duking it out over Nazi Germany and blasting cities was cool.

 

[Tom DeFranco]

That depends.

For instance, I would include Risk, Stratego, Dogfight and Hit the Beach. The first one of that kind (non hex based) was Dogfight. The first hexbased game was D-Day, which I bought myself for my twentieth birthday.

 

[Tim757]

1st game was...

AH's Battle of Bulge, pink panzers and all. That was in the mid-70's

 

[Siberian HEAT]

My first hex-based board game was Panzer Leader. I can still distinctly recall seeing the box for the first time on the shelves of the hobby store and I bought it because it had a German Panther on the back (I was a tank modeller at the time). Of all the games I've bought since then, I still look at that box and get deja vu - thinking about how it all started.

:toast:

 

[dannybou]

My first boardgame was Third Reich if I remember the title correctly. DOn't have a clue what I did with it.

 

[Fenrir]

Re: My first board game.......hmmm....

Originally posted by moondog
I would have to say the first one was a game by Hasbro (part of the Heritage Series) called Broadsides.....Each player had plastic ships (either red or blue) and they had detachable white sails.
In your turn, you could move one ship in a straight line as many "open" spots as you wanted. To score a hit you just had to end up adjacent to an enemy ship. There were also 4 shore batteries.....2 on an island and 2 on the land at the edges.....all of them across the middle. 2 batteries said MISS on the bottom and 2 said HIT.

That would be what we call now a "Beer and Pretzels" game.

My first serious game that I owned was Wooden Ships & Iron Men....and then the addiction took over like it did for most of you.
Tobruk, Wellington's Victory, Russian Campaign, Waterloo, Terrible Swift Sword, Bloody April, A Gleam of Bayonets.....and on and on and on.

And let's not forget Strategy & Tactics Magazine....with games included. Oh yeah, I had the addiction bad.......and my Mom and Dad would just look at me and shake their heads.....wondering "Where did they go wrong"

dog

they should have been shaking thier heads wondering what they did right. The sheer THINKING one has to do to play these games boggles the minds of non-gamers of today....I'd like to see the people playing Medal of Honor work thier way thru Victory Games' "Ambush" or try some solo Squad Leader.

I've got a good friend that is about a decade younger than me and has never played anything more involved than Risk. He was drained and nearly comatose after a 2 hour game of Steve Jackson's "Ogre".

 

[Iron Mike USMC]

Re: Re: My first board game.......hmmm....

Originally posted by Fenrir
they should have been shaking thier heads wondering what they did right. The sheer THINKING one has to do to play these games boggles the minds of non-gamers of today....I'd like to see the people playing Medal of Honor work thier way thru Victory Games' "Ambush" or try some solo Squad Leader.

I've got a good friend that is about a decade younger than me and has never played anything more involved than Risk. He was drained and nearly comatose after a 2 hour game of Steve Jackson's "Ogre".

When I try to play simple military games, like Stratego, and its offshoot (forget the name) which uses a similar gridded board, with sets of miniatures. They get the rules alright, but the straegy and tactics to effectively employ them still eludes them. Just like in real life, they don't get the concept that every action has a consequence. They like the games, they hate losing to the old man.

 

[tigersqn]

Originally posted by Brian King
My first hex-based board game was Panzer Leader. I can still distinctly recall seeing the box for the first time on the shelves of the hobby store and I bought it because it had a German Panther on the back (I was a tank modeller at the time). Of all the games I've bought since then, I still look at that box and get deja vu - thinking about how it all started.

:toast:

Panzer Leader was also my first game ( I had just finished building a Panther ).
Every once in a while, I still pull the game out and deploy units on one of the scenarios.

 

[Gepard]

Panzer Leader

My first game was Panzer Leader. I must have been 13 or 14 at the time. I did not start as a modeler. Instead, my interest was in military history.

I graduated from the old AH games into the monster games. SPI's War in Europe, Wacht em Rhein, and Terrible Swift Sword. We also played some GDW games.

 

[ericmwalters]

Nostalgia for that first game...

About looking at the PANZER LEADER box and getting that feeling about playing it for the first time--I get the same feeling looking at MIDWAY, PANZER BLITZ, and RICHTHOFEN'S WAR (see my earlier post). I did get PANZER LEADER shortly thereafter and also have this same kind of nostalgia.

The graphics on the game boxes, maps, and counters still seem to have a mysterious impact on me. I'll still pull them down off the shelf and fondle the components, laying out maps and moving counters around. Other newer (and even better games) stay up on the shelf growing dusty. I suffer this strange attraction to my first games...even FRANCE 1940 does this to me (another one in the pantheon of first games I ever owned/played.

What's funny is that once I lay them out and try to actually play them, I quickly realize why I've moved on to other titles since "the good old days." They were great in their time, but the art of game system and scenario design has simply left them in the dust in most cases.

As Thomas Mann wrote, "You can't go home again."
But we still "look homeward, angel" and reminisce....

Very happy memories for me.
--emw

 

[ericmwalters]

The First Games--AH versus SPI

Here's an old, old debate I'd not seen in a while....

Which games did people like when they were first playing wargames? For me, it was the Avalon Hill wargames. I just had an easier time getting into them and playing them, for the most part. SPI games were downright scary and generally something you aspired to play.

Referencing my earliest post, my first game was MIDWAY. Well, for Christmas my Dad got me SPI's THE FAST CARRIERS. It came with a paper map in a flat plastic box and tons of complicated-looking counters and--what seemed to me--a big fat rulebook.

Now, I'd also gotten a copy of THIRD REICH from Avalon Hill which looked equally intimidating. But the ad copy on the back of the box pretty much trumpeted the game as the ultimate simulation, if I remember correctly. And I knew not all AH games were like that.

But the ad copy on the back flap of THE FAST CARRIERS wasn't as reassuring. And many of the other SPI games I'd seen my new-found wargame friends cart around seemed similiarly complicated (USN is one good example). Oh, I tackled FAST CARRIERS and even enjoyed it...but it took all weekend to play a scenario between me and a buddy. We were left breathless by the experience and marveled at the game more than played it after that.

Funny thing was, SPI had plenty of "players" there in its collection of titles. But I didn't get that exposure for quite some time. When I became a senior, I got a copy of THE MOSCOW CAMPAIGN and found it very manageable and quite fun to play. It was only then I got a subscription to S&T and a whole new world opened up to me.

I will say this--and it's no surprise to anyone who played games back then. SPI had some brilliant designs, but they also had a lot of "dogs." AH seemed to have far fewer of the latter, even if they didn't exactly seem to be on the cutting edge of game design. I bought a lot of games from both companies, but ended up playing mostly AH titles with other people; solitairing or simply studying the components of the SPI games.

I think the company knew this and that's why they got into the "quad" games that were easy to pick up and fun to play. Some of my best memories were playing NAPOLEON'S LAST BATTLES Quadrigame and BATTLES FOR THE ARDENNES Quad and "Arnhem" from the WESTWALL QUAD. Even some of the full-size games were good players, although I had to uncover them: PANZERGRUPPE GUDERIAN being the most famous, I'd imagine, but also the old TURNING POINT: STALINGRAD, CONQUISTADOR, PANZERARMEE AFRIKA, etc.

Sadly, we don't seem to have quite this accessibility/variety for neophytes to cut their teeth on these days....

--emw