How Long Have You Been Playing Wargames?

[KG Erwin]

Ok, guys, I want to see just how experienced in wargaming our membership is. Don't count first-person shooter games. Only count those games which actually involve controlling units of squad-level and above and which involve tactical and /or strategic thought in deploying those units.
This is a generalized poll, so it isn't scientifically accurate. In my experience, this also gives a general idea of the age demographic here. This is an easy one, so please vote. I'll put mine in, first. (I started on Avalon Hill boardgames very early on. I got Jim Dunnigan's "1914" for Christmas 1968, and I was 11. Jeez. I already had "Stalingrad", so I was probably 11 when this fascination really started. My god, that was 36 years ago.)

[M4Jess]

1972 Panzer Leader..

My life went to hell after that![X(]

[KG Erwin]

I can see that the baby boomers and generation X-ers are going to dominate this poll. No surprise. The post-generation X-ers are more into the X-box and PlayStation types of games.

[Orzel Bialy]

Wow...20 plus years!?!?!? Where did all that time go? [X(]

[Kevin E. Duguay]

Panzer Leader also 1974. Then Panzer Blits and on and on.........

[stevemk1a]

It was 1981 or thereabouts ... I got AH's Third Reich as a X-mas present. After that came Panzerblitz and Panzerleader, Squad Leader, the morass of ASL and lots of other games (I really liked Victory Games' NATO 1986 [:)]) I still have a closet full of old wargames and S&T mags. Time flies [:(]

[M4Jess]

ORIGINAL: willy

It was 1981 or thereabouts ... I got AH's Third Reich as a X-mas present. After that came Panzerblitz and Panzerleader, Squad Leader, the morass of ASL and lots of other games (I really liked Victory Games' NATO 1986 [:)]) I still have a closet full of old wargames and S&T mags. Time flies [:(]

Nato 86! is that the one that had the Nukes!?[X(]

[stevemk1a]

Yup ... as I recall there was tactical nukes and chemical warfare "points". Whoever used the Nukes or CW first risked a "end of game" though. Nukes or CW seriously degraded the Nato air assets. My fave in that game was all the cool Russian para and marine armor and infantry assets ... I would always invade Denmark with 'em [:D]
ahh memories ... [:)]

[Nickel]

35 years, a long time. My first game was an obscure AH board game called Blitzkreig which featured two opposing sides called Big Red and Big Blue with a hypothetical world map that had territories, the object of which was to conquer while destroying the enemy army. There were tanks, mechanized, infantry,engineers, airborne and air assault (airdropped mech unit). Units had 2-3 steps with the 3rd step being a generic unit for the type unit that it replaced. CRT was simple with no effect through DR2 and you tried to get high odds for best results. Retreats through enemy zones cost steps as well as those you could outright lose from combat. There were also stacking rules.

[Wild Bill]

If you count my time as a lad when I took my chess pieces and changed them to infantry (pawns), tanks (rooks), artillery (bishops) paratroopers (khights) special forces (queen - sorry Special forces guys [:-] and the CinC (king), then since I was 12, which would be, let's see...55 years.

Afrika Korps, Midway and the original Gettysburg were my first initial purchases from AH in 1965, or 34 years.

Computer wargaming since about 1987 with an old Atari till today.

Wild Bill

[Tombstone]

I'm at 7.5 years. Well, computer wargaming at least, but honestly I didn't know sh t until I started with the computer stuff. Before that it was all rules and dice... It wouldn't have happened if not for the Wargamer and WB. I saw the website name in a magazine somewhere after getting SP1. Started to download scenarios and read the short documents on the history of the scenarios. Good stuff. The rest is history. I don't think there's a better way to learn about history than to have a game on side and information on the other.

Tomo

[degen]

I another of the 21+ crowd, having started with games like Sniper!, Firefight, and Squad Leader, among others. This was around 1978, but I layed off for years until I found SP3 in a bargain bin for $5 while traveling in Bakersfield a couple of years ago.

[Kokoda]

I started out in table-top Ancients, A Very Long Time Ago - late 60's.

If you count the "Wild Bill's innovative chess rules" approach, then it'd have to go back to the mid 50s in west Africa, playing with warrior fgure ornaments in the back yard (and the one with the cool-looking shield always won).

First person shooters?!? They didn't have them then.

[Warrior2]

First I can remember is Avalon Hill's "Gettysburg," around 1960 or so. Time flies when you're having fun.

[robot]

Sorry guys my memory is not too good anymore. But im sure i played in the back yard with toy soldiers, the lead kind with my cousins and my brother. The first board game i dont remember the name. Most of what i do remember is the stacks of little cardboard kept falling over. I would say i have been playing some kind of war stratagy for the last 65 yrs. That is if you count the back yard. What year the first war board game came out in i dont know. But it was a long time ago. I know that if PC were around a long time ago. I might not have caused my mother a lot of grief. I was not a very good boy while i was growing up. End of story.

[mogami]

Hi, 1975 or there about. (if you don't count using my own rules with my Airfix HO scale soldiers)
First board game was SPI's "War in Europe" I was never a big fan of any AH game excepting Iron Ships and Wooden Men and ASL. But then by the time I discovered them I had already been weaned on SPI. I played a lot of Napoleonic miniatures

[Sturmpionier]

I'm obviously a junior partner here. I was about negative 5 when Panzer Leader came out so...

In 1993 my girlfriend's dad got me playing Battle of the Bulge: Patton Strikes Back. At the time I played the heck out of it. I never really thought of it as a wargame, since I had never really heard the term. Anyway, girlie and I broke up and yours truly moved away to college. My first month there, a friend handed me an OEM copy of Panzer General. Impugn it all you want, but it got me involved in the genre. By that point, I was started with 1/16 miniatures with a reenacting buddy. Shortly thereafter, he turned me on to a new computer game that modeled individual vehicle and squad combat. It was called "Steel Panthers," or something like that.

[TheChin]

Hey Nickel, I use to play "Blitzkrieg" also, I still have it. I liked it because it added a level of complexity to "Tactics II", another classic abstract Avalon Hill title. I got bored with "Tactics II" (I still have that also) because the battle usually degenerated into a massive middle of the board conflagration. Blitzkrieg gave you some good options to be flexible and try different strategies.

I used to love Yaquinto games in addition to the Avalon Hill standbys. "Beachhead" and "Fast Attack Boats" were always favs. I also played their unconventional titles like "Attack Of The Killer Mutants", I wish I could find that game again, I really dug it. I thought it was cool that they took the time to name each and every unit uniquely and give them different graphics. Just good fun really, not too serious.

Other good unconventional wargames were "Ogre/G.E.V.", "Hammers Slammers" and "Star Fleet Battles" . I can't even begin to count how many hours of my teens were spent playing SFB. I wish I had a good opponent for it now, I have a box full of books, maps and counters for it.

For serious I would turn to "Flattop", "Submarine", "Panzer Leader" and "Tobruk" - which was owned by a friend, so I didn't get to play it as much as I would have liked. "Flattop" was one of those games that took forever to set up, but if you could set apart the time and space was well worth it. I doubt I could dedicate the time to it now. Ahh, the carefree days of high school when hours upon hours could be dedicated to board gaming. Which is one of the great advantages of turn-based computer gaming, you can have huge battles set up and waiting for you and you can play it whenever you can fit in a few minutes and not have to worry about the table getting bumped, your stacked armies falling over, your cat batting the pieces to the floor and your Dog promptly eating them.

Oh, and the first "real" wargame I ever owned and played was "The Kaiser's Battle". It was a bit over my head at the time, I was in 5th grade I think. I think we have talked about the game on the forums a couple years ago.

[Les_the_Sarge_9_1]

Lets see, I'm 42, I started when I was 13.

Hmm almost 3 decades.

Lets see when I started, computers might have existed, but odds are you had never seen one.
For that matter, wargames existed, but odds are you had not seem one of them either.

Come to think of it, that obnoxious hobby rolegaming was just getting started called Dungeons and Dragons.

Interesting how everyone thinks rolegaming is called Dungeons and Dragons, but wargaming is not called Tactics II or something like that eh.

I basically never get rid of wargames. Although when the Berlin wall fell, I turfed a handful of WW3 based games, as it was clear they weren't worth keeping any longer. Who wants to fight a modern what if with people that never fought. To much real history to waste time on total fiction history.
Gave a few games to a friend as a mercy offering hehe.

But basically, I never get rid of any wargame if it was worth learning in the first place.
Got quite a stash eh.
Go ahead turn off the internet, stop making computer wargames, I will not even suffer heheh.

[FNG]

My copy of PanzerBlitz is two years older than I am (1970) and my Panzer Leader is the same age (1972)... Started playing in about '82. Been role-playing, tabletop, PC & console gaming ever since, even managed to work for a games company for about 5 years (WotC).

But Steel Panthers has been my constant companion when all the others have had 'phases'.