![]() ![]() SPI rode a high tide in the early and mid-70s in a thriving market, but started to have financial difficulties in the late 70s. Strategy & Tactics attracted subscribers with a taste for SPI products, provided free advertising for SPI games, generated steady income, and through a formal feedback system allowed SPI to produce games with a predetermined market.“ Producing more than a dozen games a year, SPI attained something approaching parity with its older rival within three years The magazine proved invaluable. As Jon Freeman stated in his Complete Book of Wargames : They were bolder : starting from September 1969 Strategy & Tactics would include one wargame, complete with map & counters, attached to the central page. Not only because Strategy & Tactics would advertise their games and create a community like The General did for Avalon Hill, no. There was, of course, the question of distribution, but as they envisioned it Strategy & Tactics would solve that. The duo believed that the market for wargames was much deeper than what Avalon Hill believed, and could absorb several wargames a year. Dunnigan and Redmond Simonsen – respectively former designer and artist for Avalon Hill and who had just founded SPI. After a few difficult years, Strategy & Tactics was taken over in 1969 by James F. The clench The General had on the hobby did not stop fanzines from appearing, and one of them was Strategy & Tactics, which started in 1966. You may remember one such example on this blog : Pursuit of the Graf Spee was based on a variant for the Bismarck boardgame that Joel Billings found in the July 1979 issue of The General. The General also allowed Avalon Hill to maintain its slow release schedule (one or two games a year, as production & distribution costs were high and Avalon Hill’s management feared cannibalization) by providing scenarios or variations on the existing games. After some difficulties in the early 60s, Avalon Hill changed its strategy : as the only wargame publisher it was in its interest to organize the sprouting community around itself – both to accelerate its growth and to create a barrier to entry against newcomers – and so it started publishing The General magazine in 1964. Avalon Hill had been founded back in 1953 by Charles Roberts and was for a long time the only wargame publisher. To talk about SPI, we need to take a short detour via Avalon Hill. But let’s start with the boardgame itself, it is a good opportunity – the only opportunity – to talk about Simulations Publications Inc, better known as SPI. What is way more mysterious is how it ended up on Apple’s Special Delivery Software catalogue. ![]() Pandora boardgame was immensely popular, and it’s not a surprise it was ported on a computer. ![]() ![]() Would recommend to a designer : AbsolutelyĪs usual, this review assumes you read the AAR for the game. Pandora by SPI, published by Special Delivery Softwareį irst release : Spring 1982 on Apple II,Īverage duration of a campaign: 45 minutes (3 crewmembers who make it until the end) On the image, the name of the ship is the B MS Pandora, so evidently it is another ship that encountered a giant space alien ![]()
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