Dal numero 4 della rivista Operations della Gamers amministrata da Dean Essig. A breve metteremo disponibili via pdf i numeri della rivista in nostro possesso (che già avevamo distribuito in precedenza). In questo articolo l’inizio della creazione del primo wargame appartenente alla serie Standard Combat. Un tuffo nel passato, ma nemmeno tanto, dato che ancora oggi questa serie resiste al tempo e nuovi wargame vengono prodotti. Alla fine, in quel lontano 1992 (inizi 1993) era la Gamers a “dominare” il mercato con la GMT ancora “giovane” e altre case sparse, ma senza un preciso filo conduttore (senza dimenticare la Victory Games). Questa serie è stata e sarà sempre un cavallo di battaglia per il nostro hobby e probabilmente la più giocata di sempre. Si ricordi comunque che le serie sulla guerra civile americana e la serie tattica erano già sul mercato. L’articolo è presente anche nelle note di Essig nel wargame.
Stalingrad Pocket:
A Preview by Dean N. Essig
The history of this game (Stalingrad Pocket, to be released June, 1992) is interesting in and of itself. After I came back from my first hospital stay back in J uly 1990, there it was sitting in a huge pile of unopened company mail which had been accumulating while I was “indisposed” for the previous five weeks. It was an essentially finished game, with a beautiful hand drawn map, a complete set of counters, its own little rule book- something that could almost be released as is. In my crippled condition, as I could not give the game a fair look, I sent off a letter to its designer, Masahiro Yamazaki in Japan explaining my plight and giving my word to check it out as soon as I was able. Getting out from the backlog of work that had been piled up while I was enjoying my restful hospital stay and putting out Objective: Schmidt took up the next few months. When the dust started to settle, and I had enough time before my next rendezvous with a Mayo Clinic surgeon waving a knife, I set the little game up and gave it a shot.
While the play revealed a number of flaws in the original system, it showed the research to be good and that the game had a lot of merit if it had its system revamped. I wrote Masahiro and asked his permission to reformat the thing into the Standard Combat Series rules I had cobbled together some time back. The design of those rules had been the easiest project I had undertaken in years-the hardest part was naming the series. We dug out our Roget’s and looked up every possible version of the word “simple” so as to come up with something which conveyed the right idea-simple, yet not simplistic and not having the bad karma associated with the term introductory. Standard was our best bet, but my favorite is still “Undeveloped.” I could just see us releasing the “Undeveloped Combat Series” and guys would be rolling in the aisles at game stores world wide! Cooler heads, however, prevailed…
