Strategy & Tactics - Dunnigan Era

Dunnigan Era

Dunnigan made some radical changes. Starting with issue 18, each issue contained a complete new wargame; the first game was Crete. Not only did this represent a break from the cautious policy of Avalon Hill (pioneer company in modern commercial wargaming and the leading company in the fledgling wargaming industry) in publishing only one or two games per year (for fear of new games cannibalizing sales of old ones), but the need for new game designs spurred research into many of the lesser-known corners of military history. Despite the diversity in themes, the style of the games was fairly consistent. They predominantly used a hexgrid for the maps and many rule concepts such as zones of control were repeated in many games.

In addition to the games, the magazine featured many articles on military history, many of them notable for applying modern quantitative analysis to battles that had traditionally been described in a narrative "heroic" style.

Avalon Hill continued to produce more than just wargames, priding itself on other themes, such as party games, sports titles, and children's games. Dunnigan's focus remained primarily on military history, and he felt that there was a market for detailed historical articles as an accompaniment to detailed and accurate games. (A single experiment in using the S&T game format to explore the use of strategy and tactics in professional sports, Scrimmage, in issue #37, was not repeated.) S&T now embarked on providing six new games a year, and at a much lower cost per game than was to be found elsewhere, with the magazine itself almost being a bonus. There was no middleman in the form of a local games store; subscribers got their games delivered right to their homes. Circulation of the magazine was substantial and games that might not otherwise sell went to subscribers automatically, eclipsing expected independent sales of most titles. SPI also benefited from having the magazine as an advertising vehicle for boxed (i.e. non-magazine) games, sold directly or through local games stores.

Greg Costikyan, in an online opinion article dated 1996, remarked that

It is hard to overemphasize the importance of S&T to the history of wargaming; indeed, the rise and fall of the hobby can virtually be correlated with the rise and fall of S&T. SPI's staff freely discussed future plans, down to details of marketing and distribution, in the pages of the magazine; its subscribers began to feel a personal stake in the company's survival, going so far as to write long letters of advice and volunteering time and effort to help the company survive. The historical articles were of the highest quality, and quite unlike anything being published in the historical magazines of the period, since SPI, befitting its gaming orientation, tried to quantify almost everything, providing copious tables of comparative data on, for instance, the merits of World War II-era tanks. Other journals tended to be far more descriptive. As a result, S&T acquired a readership even among military history devotees who had no interest in the games.

S&T's circulation exceeded that of Avalon Hill's The General by the mid 1970s, improving its physical appearance dramatically under the guidance of Redmond Simonsen. (SPI's non-magazine games were improving by leaps and bounds also - their first games were made in black and white on regular paper; counters were simple coloured paper that had to be cut out and glued to cardboard by the purchaser. Rules were not done in booklet form, but on large sheets of paper folded to letter-size as a cost-savings measure. There were no costs incurred, then, for cutting, collating or binding - nor for boxes or counter trays.) As die-cut counters, printed on both sides in full colour, became the norm, they were included in the magazine games, as were two color and finally full color maps.

S&T eventually made its magazine games available for purchase in stores with standard boxes, dice and counter trays, and also sold boxes and counter trays separately for the convenience of subscribers who wanted to store their subscriber game components in something other than the envelope the magazine had been delivered in.

By the mid 1970's, SPI's annual income rose to the 6 figure range, with paid staff numbering as many as forty people, and with 40+ games being produced through both the magazine and boxed sales annually. Competition began to spring up, with many new companies appearing in the mid to late 1970s. Wargaming was reaching its high water mark, just as the release of Squad Leader by Avalon Hill took the wargaming world by storm (eventually resulting in an unprecedented 200,000 copies sold). Such faith was placed in the future of the industry that a Game Designer's Guild was even created, in the hope that it just might be possible to earn a comfortable living providing wargames to the public.