Soren Johnson always considered wargames — the pre-computer, giant hex-grid map variety — a very important, if largely theoretical, hobby:
When I was growing up, access to games was limited. My family had the standard assortment of board games, your Monopoly, your Risk, your Life. However, I remember walking through our local Yard Birds one day, and sitting at the bottom of a bookshelf, hidden in a corner, was a copy of Eric Lee Smith’s Civil War. To a nine-year-old, it was like an artifact from another planet. Two huge hex-covered maps covering the southern US? Hundreds and hundreds of counters, representing everything from Supply Depots to Grant and Lee (not to mention turkeys like Halleck and Burnsides)? An immense, detailed 60-page rulebook?Of course, I never was able to finish a game of it, but I enjoyed working my way through the game mechanics. Throughout my childhood, wargames held a place of fascination for me — a very important, if largely theoretical, hobby. Wargames shops were hard to come by, so my collection ended up fairly random. My favorites tended to be simpler games that I can barely even recall how I first found them, ones like Raphia, Blackbeard, and Belter. The latter even inspired my gaming friends to develop our own spreadsheets and macros to help us manage the economic data — it was a tycoon game before its time.
It’s hard to say what effect wargames had on me. The ratio of time spent reading rules/collecting games compared with time spent actually playing them was pretty lopsided in favor of the former. No matter how many times my friend Eric and I failed to make it through a game of Third Reich, I always considered myself a wargamer. All the time spent learning rule sets left its mark on me. Wargames were an attempt to simulate combat before computers were capable of managing these mechanics for us, so I believe that my first “gameplay programming” experience came from trying to fit all these rules into my head as a cohesive whole.