[TMP] "The Best Strategy & Tactics Magazine Games?" Topic (2024)

Getting older by the minute and sitting at my computer in a rather melancholy mood this evening after watching an episode of The Waltons while thinking of my family members who have passed away over the last few years, I've been waxing nostalgic about my early days of gaming during my youth (teens through college years).

Back when The Waltons was on air, I used to enjoy buying up random copies of Strategy & Tactics Magazine when I could afford it and playing the games therein.

So, share some memories of what you old grognards think were the best S&T games from the SPI and TSR eras of the magazine? (Yes, I know the magazine is still published, but after all this is the Old School board!)

I thought GRUNT and RAID! were good ones.

Duck

My favorite (no surprise):

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Allen

My wife and I have been playing DeathMaze, one of SPI's ziplock/pocket games. A bit later SPI published an enhanced version called Citadel of Blood as an Ares magazine game, Ares being Strategy & Tactics' fantasy & sci fi equivalent.

I liked a number of the Ares games, the Stainless Steel Rat game coming to mind first.

Back to S&T issue games: I liked Kaiser's War, Paratroop, Frigate, and Fifth Corps. The S&T issue game I played the most of was Successors, from the early part of the Decision Games era.

Battle for Germany …clever

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As a two-player game, it is interesting in that each player plays both an Allied army (Western Allies or Soviet Union) AND a German army (Western Front or Eastern Front). This forces each player to play offense and defense. The player playing the Western Allies and Eastern Germans has a very challenging task. The Western Germans have good defensive terrain (the Rhine river and Westwall defenses), while the Eastern Germans have weak units, a long front, very poor defensive terrain and they face a large Soviet and Yugoslav army. The only real advantage enjoyed by the East German player is the lack of victory points to be gained in the East, and the slow Soviet replacement rate. The Western Alllied units are very fast moving, but they don't usually get a chance to exploit this until the very end of the game (at best).

Yes, I also liked Ares magazine. I played the dickens out of the Stainless Steel Rat game! I also owned Death Maze and Citadel of Blood. Fun games. But I digress…

I didn't mention one of my favorite S&T games, so I'll mention it now. I used to enjoy The Desert Fox from 1981. Started me on a life-time fascination with the desert war. I'm not sure how it would hold up today, but the game was fun for a 20-year-old single gamer back then.

Fifth Corps started my 1980s obsession on Fulda Gap games. Great call on that one! Thank goodness Eisenbach Gap recently has shown me the light of a different "Gap" for the 1980s. LOL.

You know, I'll now have to troll ebay for all the games in this thread. My wife will hate me! :-)

In no particular order, some of my favorites are:

Cedar Mountain: Part of the Great Battles of the American Civil War series. I played this one several times and it was possible to win playing either side. (Pea Ridge is still my most favorite game of the single-map games in the series.)

Ney vs. Wellington: This was a modified version of the Wellington's Victory game mechanics applied to the battle of Quatre Bras. Although the French have limited options in how to approach the Anglo-Allied position (mostly due to the end-of-the-world effect imposed by the width of the map), it was still a fun and tense game.

Monmouth: This was an even more modified version of the Ney vs. Wellington game system applied to one of the more interesting battles of the American War of Independence. Another tense game (especially for the Continental player) with some interesting "chrome" rules for things like heat exhaustion, etc. This was the last issue/game that was done by the original SPI before they were swallowed by TSR.

Breitenfeld: A simple game using a variant of the Napoleon at Waterloo game system but set in the Thirty Years War. Although the game lacked a lot of the flavor of the musket-and-pike warfare of the period, it was still a fun and fast game that could go right down to the wire.

I'm sure there are a number of others I could mention, but these are at the top of the list. I still have all of these games (plus dozens of others) and I really should get them out for another session sometime.

The most unplayable had to be Bastogne. Since it was almost the first issue I subscribed to. this could have had tragic consequences. Having to mount and cut out the counters didn't help either.

I really enjoyed American Civil War and Frigate.
Was CA a magazine game? That was good too.

I haven't got or played many but i am with Allen in that 53 The Punic Wars is my favourite. But 57 PanzerGruppe Guderian is good too.

Agent 13 – I was given an unpunched S&T may with Desert Fox in in only last week by a non-gaming friend that is moving overseas and culling a book collection. Strange times.

I have heard good things on 33 Winter War, liked 73 Panzer Battles, 181 Fall of Rome remake (though the original was good if not errata-ridden and I only play the game with the basic rules) and have about 5-6 games that are on my 'to play list'.

I'm another fan of Borodino. I also liked Stonewall: The Battle of Kernstown, March 23, 1862.

Frederick the Great was one of the most intense boardgames I've ever played.

Rick

Got started with (S&T) Combat Command and Borodino.

Liked Raid!

Played Cobra quite a bit with my brother (either it was very unbalanced or my brother is much better than the Germans – I could never get through).

Liked Centurion and Armageddon.

Too busy with the big games to do a lot of the other issue games – when you spend days playing War in the East, Wellington's Victory, Highway to the Reich, and Wacht am Rhein you don't get a lot of the smaller ones done.

Of course the longer I sit at the computer thinking about it the more titles I remember enjoying. Although to be frank I spent far more time reading the magazines cover-to-cover. There was good writing in there.

The S&T magazine game I must have played most was "Tank!". A flawed game (you shouldn't really glom up the to-hit and to-kill probabilities into a 1d6 roll, and the soft target attack rules were silly), but it gave me hours and hours of fun.

The one that stands up best to the test of time, and also got a good deal of play, was "Grunt" -- as far as I know John Kramer's only design, but, as he had been an arty FO with the Air Cav in VN, he knew what he was writing about. It can only have been the general distaste for VN games at the time it came out that kept the game so low in the acceptability ratings.

Other magazine games I remember as especially well done were "Brietenfeld", "Battle for Germany", "Cobra" and "Punic Wars" already mentioned, but also "Sixth Fleet", "Wolfpack", "Fighting Sail" and "Kharkov". Having disliked the game for years, I also went through an odd stage of playing lots of "Combat Command", which I can only ascribe to my having never played "Panzerblitz" (though I have played "Tactical Game 3").

"Raid!" was a disappointment to me because of the too-lethal CRT and badly-designed scenarios, "Panzergruppe Guderian" was a brilliant system but a dull game, and I deperately wanted to like "Panzer Battles", but someone had found a way to make tactical tank combat boring.

When I started working in Saudi Arabia, I discovered that I knew a lot more about the geography of the Persian Gulf than the average new expat, which I ascribed to having played a good deal of "Oil War".

Board wargames -- Americans' way of teaching the British geography.

All the best,

John.

Strategy 1, yes-I'm that old. Old Blitzkrieg Mod system player also.

Nato, Nato Division Commander and the Next War-all flawed but at the time great to rip into.

War In The Ice-the only game I rolled three snake eyes' in a row and shredded a Soviet column.

6th Fleet-played Soviet and crippled the US carrier group with combination land -based bombers, missile cruisers and a sneaky Akula. Taught me to respect Soviet tactics.

PRESTAGS-taught me to see miniature rules differently.

So many others…I remember when games cost 5.00$, miniature rules/rpg's cost 8.00$ and gas was 27 cents a gallon… Of course, I was making 1.65/hour.

How about a Command Decision game poll?-Thought I would ask first.

What? No one has mentioned The Plot to Assassinate Hitler?

That game was surreal.

I don't even remember why, but my favorite has always been "Veracruz". I have a soft spot for "Oil War" because it was designed by one of the Tehran embassy hostages (Richard Queen?) and I remember reading his description of playing games while he was being held and how his captors squabbled constantly over whether dice were Islamic or not.

LT

Eylau.

Campaigns in the Valley: Jackson's and Sheridan's campaigns in the Shenandoah.

I agree with aegiscg47 about quality issues arising from the rapid development of games but I think this also drove a lot of innovation. On the flip side I think there are plenty of boxed games costing much more that also suffer from inadequate development.

Bordino and the brigade version of Napoleon at Waterloo which you got the Divisional version free with subscription but had to pay $5USD !!LOL! for the expansion.

I was a very big fan of all of the QUAD series.

PanzerBlitz first appeared in S&T magazine.

Also liked Raid, Grunt, Sixth Fleet, October War, Oil war.

I'm sure there were others that I can't recall right now.

S&T mag games:
Conquistador.
Berlin '85.

S&T games:
Most played..The East is Red. Played the heck outta that game.

BAOR

link

I liked to see how quickly I would have got fried if it really kicked off then

(Former speed bump for 3rd Shock Army GSFG)

PS I used to live at 3742 on the map back in the '60s….