Appendix E: The Workshops
The individual contributions of key designers from SPI, GDW, and their orbits to the wargaming hobby. Not company histories but a focused look at specific people who created mechanics, standards, and design philosophies that became industry foundations and persist today.
The goal across all entries is to trace specific, concrete contributions: this person created or refined this mechanic or approach, and here is where you can see it in games today.
James F. Dunnigan — Founded SPI (Simulations Publications, Inc.) in 1969 and built it into the dominant wargame publisher of the 1970s. More than any other individual, Dunnigan industrialized wargame design: he developed systematic, repeatable methods for translating historical research into playable simulations and trained an entire generation of designers in those methods. Designed or co-designed over a hundred games, including PanzerBlitz, Kampfpanzer, Jutland, War in the East, and the ground-breaking Modern Battles quad series. Created Strategy & Tactics magazine as a vehicle for publishing wargames on a regular schedule, establishing the magazine game as a format. Authored The Complete Wargames Handbook (later revised as Wargames Handbook), which remains the closest thing the hobby has to a foundational textbook on design methodology. Also pioneered the use of commercial wargame design techniques for professional military analysis and consulting, bridging the hobby and defense communities. SPI’s case-format rules structure (discussed in Chapter 17), its commitment to historical research standards, and its philosophy that games should be designed around a central historical question all trace back to Dunnigan’s influence. The hobby as it exists today, its conventions, its vocabulary, its expectations for what a wargame should be, was shaped more by Dunnigan and the designers he mentored at SPI than by any other single source.
Al Nofi — SPI’s Research Director and Associate Editor of Strategy & Tactics from 1969 to 1982, over a decade at the center of the hobby’s most influential publisher. While Dunnigan was the entrepreneurial force and Simonsen the visual designer, Nofi was the intellectual backbone. He brought genuine academic credentials (a Ph.D. in Military History from CUNY) and a conviction that wargame design is itself a form of historical inquiry. His own words capture the philosophy: “My primary interest in wargames is how they can help understand events.” His methodology was meticulous. For the Imperium Romanum series, he built a six-foot by two-foot flow chart tracking Roman legion movements during the civil wars following Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, later converted to a 500 MB computerized file. He researched recruiting pools across different periods, accounting for population demographic shifts caused by epidemics beginning in the Second Century. Designed or co-designed Renaissance of Infantry, Centurion, Caporetto, Imperium Romanum (which he refined across three editions spanning 1979 to 2018), The Great War, Salerno, and numerous other titles, often collaborating with Dunnigan. Published over thirty books of military history independently, including The Gettysburg Campaign, The Waterloo Campaign, and To Train the Fleet for War (which won the John Lyman Book Award in Navy History in 2011). Later became a research analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses and served as field representative to the Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group. Nofi helped establish the expectation, now taken for granted, that a serious wargame should be backed by serious research. His thirty books of military history confirm that the scholarship came first and the game design followed from it.
John Young (1947–1978) — SPI’s accountant by job title, one of its most prolific designers by output. Young worked at SPI’s offices in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, designing games in what was nominally his spare time. He was fired in 1974 when someone had to take the fall for SPI’s chronic inability to turn a profit. He died in May 1978 at thirty years old. In the time he had, he designed or co-designed an extraordinary number of games across every scale and period: Armageddon, Austerlitz, Borodino, Dreadnought, Fall of Rome, La Grande Armee, Lee Moves North, Musket & Pike, Phalanx, Red Star/White Star, Rifle & Saber, Search & Destroy, and others. Strategy I (1971, co-designed with Dunnigan, Patrick, and Simonsen) was an enormously ambitious modular system containing 36 modules simulating battles from 350 BC to 1984 with over 1,000 counters. Young himself admitted it was “likened to an unwanted orphan child with leprosy” because of its scope. PRESTAGS (1975) took five separate ancient and medieval tactical games SPI had published between 1970 and 1972 and unified them under a common ruleset with cross-compatible units. The breakthrough was that strength values derived from the same mathematical base, enabling cross-period scenarios. The Marne (1972), a divisional-level simulation of the August–September 1914 campaign, was praised for clean rules and exciting play, and inspired the author’s entire World Undone series. Young explicitly rejected over-complexity, preferring games abstract enough to play fast so players could reach strategic decisions. He favored what he called “viciously capricious” mechanics to introduce uncertainty rather than letting calculating players exploit deterministic sequential movement. He is also credited with coining the use of “grognard” to describe veteran wargamers, comparing the grumbling of SPI’s players to Napoleon’s legendary Grognards. The term entered Strategy & Tactics from his usage around the office and became permanent wargaming vocabulary.
Eric Smith — Designer at SPI from 1979 to 1982, then co-founder and senior designer at Victory Games when Avalon Hill recruited ex-SPI staff after TSR’s acquisition. At SPI he designed Pea Ridge: The Gettysburg of the West (1980, nominated for best wargame of the year) and The Alamo: Victory in Death (1981, also nominated, still in print). At Victory Games he produced three designs that each left a mark on the hobby. The Civil War 1861–1865 (1983) simulated the entire war at strategic scale with an innovative Command Point system where players prioritize theaters and dice determine distribution. Mark Simonitch’s 2015 The US Civil War draws from Smith’s design, a measure of its lasting influence. Ambush! (1983, co-designed with John Butterfield) was a solitaire squad-level WWII game where enemy forces had no markers on the board until they appeared, controlled by cross-referenced tables and a paragraph book. It won the 1984 Origins Award and became one of the most successful purpose-designed solitaire wargames ever published. Smith’s most enduring contribution came in Panzer Command (1984), a tactical WWII game where he originated the chit-pull activation system. Each player randomly draws a chit to determine which formation activates next, replacing the traditional I-Go-You-Go structure with unpredictable turn sequencing that better simulates fog of war and command friction. The mechanic has since appeared in over 700 published games, making it one of the most widely adopted innovations in wargame design history. Later founded Shenandoah Studio, which brought wargames to iPad, and continues designing with Compass Games (the Battle Hymn series).
Kevin Zucker — Operational-level design philosophy and the Napoleonic systems that set the template for an entire generation of operational games. The author’s mentor and a recurring reference throughout this book. Zucker worked at SPI in the early 1970s, rising to Production Manager and overseeing 24 issues of Strategy & Tactics (plus enclosed games) and 48 boxed games over two years. After leaving SPI in 1976, he founded Operational Studies Group (OSG) to publish Napoleon at Bay (1978), a ziplock bag game simulating Napoleon’s 1814 campaign. Napoleon at Leipzig (1979) won the Charles S. Roberts Award. These games established Zucker’s design signature: operational warfare where command control, administration, and supply force players to face conflicting imperatives between maneuvering freely and conserving their army. His concept of “strategic consumption,” where great distances absorb manpower through an Attrition Table and lengthening Lines of Communication, modeled logistics as a playable constraint rather than bookkeeping, years before other designers attempted anything similar. The Library of Napoleonic Battles (TLNB) is his life’s work: an ambitious project to present 88 battles of the Napoleonic era across a unified system, with 82 published so far through a GMT/OSG partnership. Each box brings together four or five battles of one campaign with detailed historical information. The system has evolved across editions, adding cavalry charges, cards for movement and higher command decisions, and refinements drawn from decades of play. Zucker also published Wargame Design Magazine through OSG (38 issues, released as free PDFs), sharing design knowledge with the broader community. Inducted into the Clausewitz Award Hall of Fame in 2003. His four-decade commitment to refining a single operational system is unusual in the hobby and reflects a design philosophy that a good system rewards sustained investment rather than constant reinvention.
Mark Herman — Trained at SPI under Dunnigan and Simonsen starting in 1976, then invented the card-driven game format that reshaped the hobby. His early SPI designs included The Battle for Jerusalem, October War, The Next War, and others across modern and ancient subjects. After TSR acquired SPI, he became Executive Vice President at Victory Games, where Gulf Strike (1983, used in US analytic efforts at the start of the Gulf War in 1990) and Pacific War (1985) established him as a designer of serious operational simulations. Then came We the People (1993, Avalon Hill), the first card-driven wargame. Players alternate playing strategy cards from a 64-card deck, each usable as either a historical event or for operations points to activate leaders, place political control markers, or bring reinforcements. The game replaced hex maps with point-to-point movement and CRTs with card-based resolution. Herman deliberately left the CDG mechanic in the public domain, opening it for other designers rather than protecting it. The result was a new genre: Hannibal, Paths of Glory, Twilight Struggle, and dozens more trace directly to his decision. His subsequent designs continued pushing the format. Empire of the Sun (2005, GMT, CSR Award winner) advanced the CDG engine further. Churchill (2015, GMT, Golden Geek Award) modeled Big Three negotiations. Fort Sumter compressed the CDG format into a short game about the Secession Crisis. Pacific War returned in a massive 2022 GMT edition. Beyond design, Herman spent decades in professional wargaming, working at Booz Allen Hamilton leading wargaming and simulation work for the US military, and teaching at Georgetown University and Columbia University. Inducted into the Charles S. Roberts Hall of Fame in 1991. Published Wargames According to Mark (GMT, 2024), 200 pages of design writing plus 60 pages of CDG development notes. He trained in SPI’s hex-and-counter tradition and then built the format that replaced it.
Richard Berg (1943–2019) — Criminal defense attorney by profession, one of the most prolific and controversial designers in the hobby’s history, with 195 credited designs. Trained in Asian History at Union College and held a JD from Brooklyn Law School. Served in the US Army from 1967–1969 as musical director of the Army Theater in Frankfurt. His first published game, Hooker and Lee (1975), was part of SPI’s Blue and Gray II. Terrible Swift Sword (SPI, 1976) won the Charles S. Roberts Award for Best Tactical Game and set the standard for “monster” grand-tactical simulations of single battles. The Campaign for North Africa (SPI, 1978) was his most infamous design: estimated at 1,500 hours to complete, famous for requiring Italian troops to receive extra water rations to prepare pasta. Berg described it as “wretched excess” by deliberate intent, and it remains the ultimate example of simulation taken to its logical extreme. The Great Battles of History series (GMT, starting 1991) was his signature achievement: ancient and medieval tactical combat across fifteen volumes including The Great Battles of Alexander, SPQR (co-designed with Mark Herman, CSR Award and Origins Award winner), Caesar, and Cataphract. The system featured leader-driven activation, shock combat, and unit cohesion mechanics. The Men of Iron series (GMT, 1999 onward) covered medieval European warfare with a continuation activation mechanic emphasizing momentum and counterattacks. Inducted into the Charles S. Roberts Hall of Fame in 1987 and the Academy of Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame in 1997. Won the industry award for best game design eleven times. Also published Berg’s Review of Games, which won Best Amateur Magazine at the Origins Awards three times. Berg was brilliant, prolific, and combative, and the hobby could not ignore him on any count. He died in Charleston, South Carolina in July 2019.
David Isby — SPI’s first employee, joining Poultron Press in 1970 before it became Simulations Publications. For nine years he served as copy editor of Strategy & Tactics and contributed to the design, development, and research of major SPI products including War in Europe, War in the Pacific, and Campaign for North Africa. His own designs focused on subjects other designers avoided. Air War (1977) simulated jet combat from the 1950s through the 1980s and won a Game Designers’ Guild award for showing advantages of position without requiring plotting, a significant advance over prior air combat systems. To the Green Fields Beyond (1978), covering the Battle of Cambrai in 1917, won a Charles S. Roberts Award. Inducted into the Charles S. Roberts Hall of Fame in 1979. What set Isby apart from his SPI contemporaries was his parallel career as a Washington, D.C., attorney and national security consultant. He testified before the House Armed Services Committee on tactical air power. His books on the Soviet military and Afghanistan were written while those subjects were current, not retrospective. Weapons and Tactics of the Soviet Army (Jane’s, 1981) analyzed an army that was actively fighting in Afghanistan. His three books on the Afghan conflict covered an ongoing war. The pre-glasnost Soviet government condemned him for his writings and activities, a measure of how seriously his work was taken outside the hobby. He published or edited twenty books and over 350 articles on national security topics. Where most SPI designers simulated the past, Isby modeled the present, and his professional defense credentials gave that work weight outside the hobby.
Redmond Simonsen (1942–2005) — Invented wargame graphic design as a discipline. Held a BFA from Cooper Union. Before SPI, he designed the book jacket for Is Paris Burning?, created album covers for London Records, and sold photographs to TIME and Newsweek. He brought a professional designer’s training into a hobby that had been getting by on crude visual standards. Art director and executive art editor at SPI from its early days through 1982, supervising the release of over 400 game titles. Coined the term “physical systems design” for the application of graphic design to board games and is credited with popularizing the term “game designer” as a defined role. Also invented the role of “game developer” as a professional responsible for turning a designer’s prototype into a camera-ready product. His innovations accumulated game by game. He evolved maps from black-and-white to two-color to full-color. He made counters professionally mounted, die-cut, and printed on both sides. He reintroduced the method of conforming rivers to hexsides (originally from Avalon Hill’s D-Day but abandoned) and it became the universal standard. John Prados recalled that “Redmond prided himself on making at least one graphical innovation each game.” His core principle: graphics serve gameplay. “The more graphic engineering the artist can build into the game equipment and rules, the easier and more enjoyable becomes the play of the game.” The map was a functional tool that communicates terrain, movement, and game state to the player. That philosophy is as much a design contribution as any mechanic in this book. He also designed games himself, most notably StarForce: Alpha Centauri (1974), the first mass-market science fiction board wargame and an SPI best-seller. Inducted into the Charles S. Roberts Hall of Fame in 1977. After TSR acquired SPI in 1982, he co-founded Ares Development Corporation and later worked in video game development. Died of a heart attack in 2005 at sixty-two. The Redmond A. Simonsen Memorial Award for Outstanding Presentation was created in his honor. The visual language he established at SPI, color-coded terrain on hex maps, standardized counter formats, rivers on hexsides, full-color double-sided counters, remains the foundation of wargame graphic design. Open any wargame published in the last forty years and you are looking at conventions Simonsen established.
GDW and Frank Chadwick — Game Designers’ Workshop was founded June 22, 1973, in Normal, Illinois, by Frank Chadwick, Rich Banner, Marc Miller, and Loren Wiseman. For twenty-three years the company published a new product approximately every twenty-two days, rivaling SPI’s output across a wider range of formats: board wargames, miniatures rules, and RPGs. Richard Berg called Chadwick “one of, if not the, finest game designer working today,” citing a body of work remarkable for its breadth. Chadwick’s contributions started with Drang Nach Osten! (1973, co-designed with Paul Banner), the first commercial “monster” board wargame: 1,792 counters, five maps stretching from Warsaw to Stalingrad, 25 km per hex. It launched the Europa series, an ongoing project to simulate the entire Second World War in Europe under a unified system. Over a dozen Europa titles followed, and the series was ranked first among 202 wargames in a 1976 player survey. The Third World War series (1984) modeled hypothetical NATO versus Warsaw Pact conflict at theater level. Command Decision (1988) brought operational-scale thinking to miniatures gaming, with players commanding divisions and corps rather than squads. Twilight: 2000 (1984, co-designed with Dave Nilsen, Loren Wiseman, and Lester Smith) put American soldiers in a post-nuclear Europe where survival mattered more than firepower, won the H.G. Wells Award for Best Roleplaying Rules, and spawned over forty supplements. Marc Miller’s Traveller (1977) became the defining science fiction RPG. Space: 1889 predated the term “steampunk.” Where SPI was survey-driven and magazine-centric, GDW was designer-driven with Chadwick as the creative engine across formats. Their house style favored operational and strategic scale with realistic orders of battle and logistical modeling. Inducted into the Charles S. Roberts Hall of Fame and the Origins Hall of Fame, both in 1984. GDW closed on February 29, 1996. After its closure, Chadwick became a fiction author through Baen Books. His Gulf War Fact Book hit the New York Times bestseller list. Free League Publishing relaunched Twilight: 2000 in 2021. GDW’s influence on the hobby stands alongside SPI’s.
Jack Radey — Self-published Korsun Pocket through his own People’s War Games in 1979, proving that a machinist with no game industry connections could produce a professional-quality monster game (2,400 counters, artwork by Rodger B. MacGowan). Taught himself German and Russian to access primary sources that other Western designers could not read, and assembled a network of translators and archivists to get at Soviet records when most of the hobby relied uncritically on Wehrmacht memoirs. His research-driven methodology set the standard for Eastern Front historical rigor: when Russian archives were digitized decades later, he went back and corrected errors in the original Korsun Pocket, removing units (JS-2s, Ferdinands, T-34-85s) that turned out not to have been present at the battle. The 43-year gap between Korsun Pocket (1979) and Korsun Pocket 2 (2022), during which he continued researching and publicly correcting his own work, is almost unprecedented in the hobby. His design philosophy that games should reward historically-organized play rather than counter-pushing, and his insistence that wargame designers are historians first, influenced the seriousness with which subsequent designers approached research. Also notable as the hobby’s self-described “house red”: an open Communist who designed games about Soviet military operations, wore a Red Army star to a professional wargaming conference at a U.S. Air Force base, and challenged speakers on the ethics of precision weapons. His games are respected for fairness and accuracy regardless of his politics, demonstrating that political conviction and historical objectivity can coexist. Co-authored The Defense of Moscow, 1941 (Pen & Sword Press).
Rick Barber (1954–2021) — Landscape painter by training who became the principal map artist at Clash of Arms Games, working with founder Ed Wimble starting in the early 1980s. Barber used a hand-etched terrain style that he never abandoned in favor of computer graphics, producing maps with the quality of landscape paintings applied to wargame cartography. His work on The Emperor Returns, Napoleon at Leipzig, The Six Days of Glory, and Summer Storm (which he also designed) established Clash of Arms’ visual identity and raised expectations across the hobby for what a wargame map could look like. Where Redmond Simonsen at SPI established a clean, functional graphic language for wargames, Barber showed that maps could be beautiful objects in their own right while remaining playable. He knew the Gettysburg battlefield particularly well and rendered it multiple times for different games. A signature touch: he hid a small terrain feature labeled “Le Chat Noir” (or the local-language equivalent) on every map, a nod to his Black Cat Studio workspace. His daughter Nikki has preserved his remaining artwork through blackcatstudio.live.
Jack Greene — Founded Quarterdeck Games in 1979, building it into a publisher focused on naval simulations. His empirical approach to ship ratings, shell weight multiplied by rate of fire rather than shell size, became a foundational method for quantifying naval firepower (referenced in Chapter 13 of this book). Ironbottom Sound won the 1981 Charles S. Roberts Award for Best Initial Release. Other notable designs include Destroyer Captain, The Royal Navy (which introduced a staggered movement phase system for handling initiative in naval combat), and TOGO: Dawn of the Dreadnought covering the Russo-Japanese War. Also a published historian, co-authoring Rommel’s North Africa Campaign, Hitler Strikes North, and Ironclads at War. Inducted into the Charles Roberts Awards Hall of Fame in 1990. Greene’s work gave naval wargaming a rigor and depth that encouraged other designers to take the subject seriously.
Lee Brimmicombe-Wood — The most important air combat wargame designer working today. The Wing Leader series (GMT Games) introduced a side-view map perspective where the X-axis represents the raid path and the Y-axis represents altitude. This was not a visual gimmick but a genuine insight about WWII air combat, where the tactical problem for fighter controllers was managing approach axis and altitude advantage. The system operates at squadron and flight scale, modeling formation management, cohesion, and situational awareness. Downtown modeled the interaction between American strike packages and North Vietnam’s integrated air defense system. Nightfighter used a blind play/umpire system for WWII night interception with asymmetric information. Bomber Command covered the RAF night bombing campaign. Won the James F. Dunnigan Award for Outstanding Achievement in wargame design. Also has a parallel career in video game design (Supermassive Games, Rebellion, Eidos, among others). Across his body of work, Brimmicombe-Wood has covered air warfare from every angle, strike packages, night interception, strategic bombing, tactical air combat, and proved that air warfare can sustain deep, innovative game systems rather than being bolted onto ground games as an afterthought.
Mark Simonitch — Graphic artist and designer, inducted into the Charles S. Roberts Hall of Fame in 2002 on the strength of either career independently. Created maps, counters, and art for over 100 wargames across GMT Games, Strategy & Tactics, Avalon Hill, and others. His maps for Twilight Struggle, Paths of Glory, Empire of the Sun, and Wilderness War established the modern visual standard for wargame cartography, doing for the GMT era what Redmond Simonsen did for SPI. As a designer, created the ZOC Bond mechanic: when two friendly units sit two hexes apart, they project a bond along the connecting hex spines that enemy units cannot enter or cross, also blocking retreats and supply lines. A defensive line does not require a unit in every hex. Two units two hexes apart seal the gap between them, forcing the defender to choose between a dense line (strong everywhere, thin reserves) and a bond line (gaps filled by bonds, freeing reserves but vulnerable if an anchor is destroyed). The ZOC Bond system drives his operational WWII series: France ‘40, Normandy ‘44, Ardennes ‘44, Holland ‘44, Salerno ‘43, Stalingrad ‘42, and others, all published by GMT. Also designed Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage (originally Avalon Hill), one of the foundational card-driven games alongside We the People.
Dean Essig (1961–2024) — Founded The Gamers in 1988 and built it into the most series-driven wargame publisher in the hobby before its acquisition by Multi-Man Publishing in 2001, where he continued designing until his death from cancer at 63. Created seven major game series spanning 99+ titles: the Civil War Brigade Series, Tactical Combat Series, Operational Combat Series, Standard Combat Series, Napoleonic Brigade Series, Line of Battle, and Battalion Combat Series. His single most important contribution was the series rules concept itself. Before Essig, most wargames had bespoke rule sets and every new game meant learning from scratch. Essig organized games into series with shared core rules and game-specific “exclusive” rules (what he called the “gimmick”), which reduced learning curves, enabled efficient production, and let players build expertise in a system rather than starting fresh each time. This approach became an industry standard that publishers from GMT (COIN series) to Columbia adopted. The OCS made logistics a central, playable mechanic rather than bookkeeping. The SCS proved that simple, fast-playing hex-and-counter games could still reward skill and capture historical flavor. Fourteen Charles S. Roberts Awards across his series. He also gave the author the opportunity to design Rostov ‘41 for the SCS, which helped launch the author’s career in the business. Also served as artist for many of his company’s games and hosted Homercon, an annual gaming convention in Homer, Illinois, from 1990 to 2012. After his death, Carl Fung assumed management of The Gamers’ game lines at MMP.
Mark McLaughlin — Designing consistently good games since the Avalon Hill era, with a catalog of 27+ published designs spanning five decades. War and Peace (1980), his Napoleonic Wars game, sold approximately 50,000 copies and remains in print in its sixth edition. A journalist and professional writer by trade (managing editor of The Wargamer, AP copy boy, novelist, ghostwriter), McLaughlin pitched War and Peace over lunch with Avalon Hill’s Tom Shaw and walked out with a signed contract. His design philosophy prioritizes accessibility and sweep: lighter, faster games that capture the grand strategic picture without drowning in tactical detail. The Napoleonic Wars and Wellington (GMT) brought card-driven grand strategy to the Napoleonic period. Hitler’s Reich (GMT, 2017) introduced the Card Conquest System, replacing traditional CRTs and counters with card-based conflict resolution, playable in two hours. Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea (with Christopher Vorder Bruegge) applied similar accessibility principles to the ancient world. Rebel Raiders on the High Seas covered Civil War naval warfare at strategic scale. McLaughlin represents the tradition of the accessible wargame, consistently pushing to make complex conflicts playable in shorter timeframes without sacrificing strategic depth, while his background as a professional writer shows in his games’ emphasis on narrative and sweep over mechanical crunch.
Amabel Holland — Hollandspiele co-founder. Refuses formulaic design: each game gets mechanics built from scratch for its specific historical situation rather than recycling existing systems. Table Battles created a new format (dice-allocation wargame playable in 30 minutes on a small table). Uses games as expressive medium for political and personal themes (This Guilty Land on American slavery, Doubt Is Our Product on corporate disinformation). Author of Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems (CRC Press). Proves wargames can be art and personal expression while remaining historically grounded. The New Yorker called her “one of today’s most innovative game designers.” The author submitted designs to Hollandspiele early on and was rejected, but the experience was positive and instructive.
Ty Bomba — Over 160 published designs, one of the two or three most prolific designers in history. Co-founded XTR, edited Strategy & Tactics, founded Command magazine, edited CounterFact (pioneering alternative-history wargaming as a serious subgenre). Eight years in military intelligence (Navy Intelligence, NSA) informed his focus on Eastern Front and Middle Eastern topics. Charles Roberts Awards Hall of Fame inductee. Bomba kept S&T and Command alive as design platforms during periods when the hobby was contracting, and explored more historical topics than almost any other designer. No one has designed more magazine wargames.
Joe Miranda — 185+ published designs, rivaling Bomba for output. Chief wargame designer and editor at Decision Games/Strategy & Tactics. Former U.S. Army officer who taught unconventional warfare at JFK Special Warfare Center. Pioneered the solo mini-game format at Decision Games (the Commando series), creating affordable solitaire entry points that kept solo wargaming alive during lean years. Designs span from ancient Rome (Trajan) to Vietnam (In Country) to science fiction (Phobos Rising). The workhorse of magazine wargaming: as both editor and chief designer, he ensured subscribers received a playable game every issue across every conceivable period.
Ted Raicer — Paths of Glory (1999) took the CDG system pioneered by Mark Herman and expanded its simulation value, applying it to WWI, a war most designers considered too static to make exciting. Before Paths of Glory, WWI was a dead-end subject. After it, WWI became one of the hobby’s most popular periods. The “Dark” series (Dark Valley, Dark Sands, Dark Summer) demonstrates parallel mastery of traditional hex-and-counter operational design, proving fluency in both CDG and classic formats. I, Napoleon showed willingness to experiment beyond traditional formats. Nine Charles S. Roberts Awards. Published more than ten games on WWI alone, making him the hobby’s foremost WWI specialist.
Volko Ruhnke — Created the COIN (COunterINsurgency) system, arguably the most important new wargame system of the 21st century. COIN uses a shared event card display (not individual hands) to drive initiative and faction selection, with four asymmetric factions carrying completely different capabilities, victory conditions, and strategies. Career CIA intelligence analyst. Designed COIN as an open platform: other designers have created volumes covering topics from Roman Britain to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The COIN series brought asymmetric multiplayer wargaming to the mainstream hobby and attracted eurogamers and non-wargamers (Cole Wehrle’s Root is directly descended from COIN). Also designed Labyrinth: The War on Terror and Wilderness War.
Fred Serval — French designer, one of the newest voices in the hobby. Red Flag Over Paris (2021) adapted Mark Herman’s card-driven framework for the 1871 Paris Commune with innovations including Political Dynamics, dual asymmetric victory conditions, and Momentum mechanics. Used computational statistics (R scripts testing thousands of card combinations across billions of deck configurations) to balance the game, a data-driven approach to development. A Gest of Robin Hood compressed the COIN framework into a two-player game playable in under an hour. Design philosophy prioritizes accessibility without sacrificing historical depth. Hosts the Homo Ludens YouTube channel. The author worked with Serval as developer on With The Hammer (discussed in Chapter 16), and his contributions reshaped that design.
Morgane Gouyon-Rety — French engineer specializing in the ancient and Hellenistic world. Pendragon (COIN Vol. VIII) adapted the COIN system for late Roman/post-Roman Britain, modeling civilizational collapse rather than insurgency. Hubris: Twilight of the Hellenistic World covers the twilight of the Hellenistic kingdoms (220–165 BCE) using an entirely original system, the “Hubris engine,” built around leader-centric gameplay where individual rulers and their ambitions drive events, mirroring ancient historiography. Models Rome as a non-player alien power: threateningly unpredictable, influenceable but never controllable. Design philosophy: complexity should reside in mastering gameplay, not mastering the rules. One of very few designers focusing on the ancient world with the depth and rigor it deserves.
Hermann Luttmann — The hobby’s most effective bridge-builder between hardcore wargaming and general gaming audiences. Created the Blind Swords system (chit-pull activation mixing event and unit chits to model fog of war, friction, and fortune) and its evolution, the Black Swan system (card-draw based for larger games like A Most Fearful Sacrifice). Dawn of the Zeds, a cooperative zombie defense game built on wargame design principles, sold more copies than all his wargame sales combined, three times over. Uses variable die types for combat (better units roll D12, weaker roll D6) and push-your-luck mechanics (In Magnificent Style for Pickett’s Charge). Focuses on playability and accessibility without dumbing down historical content. When someone asks what wargame to recommend to a first-timer, a Luttmann design is usually the right answer.
Darin Leviloff — Created the State of Siege series at Victory Point Games, one of the most successful and enduring solitaire wargame systems. The system places the player at the center of converging enemy advances, using a track-based structure where threats move inward along multiple axes and the player allocates limited actions to hold them off. Simple enough to learn in minutes, deep enough to model conflicts from the fall of the Roman Republic (Legions of Darkness) to the Israeli War of Independence (Israeli Independence). The State of Siege format became a template that other designers built on, helping establish Victory Point Games as the home of accessible solo wargaming. A staple of solitaire play and a reliable entry point for new wargamers.
Brian Train — One of the hobby’s most important designers of asymmetric and insurgency warfare games, working in this space long before the COIN series brought it mainstream attention. Designs include A Distant Plain (co-designed with Volko Ruhnke for the COIN series), Colonial Twilight (the first two-player COIN volume), and dozens of smaller games on guerrilla warfare, counterinsurgency, and irregular conflict published through various small publishers. A professional urban planner by training, which informs his systems-level thinking about how populations, infrastructure, and armed groups interact. Has also done serious work in professional military wargaming and education. Train’s games model the political and social dimensions of conflict, hearts and minds, population control, legitimacy, with a rigor that pure military simulations often miss. Train has done more to model the political dimensions of conflict than any other designer working today.
Chad Jensen (1967–2019) — Designer of Combat Commander (GMT Games), arguably the most significant tactical WWII game since ASL. Combat Commander uses no dice. A purely card-driven resolution system where each Fate card carries a random number replacing die rolls while simultaneously serving as orders, actions, and events. No fixed sequence of play: activations are fluid and reactive, with either player able to play Actions at almost any time. Nationality-specific Fate decks model doctrinal strengths and weaknesses through card distribution rather than special rules. Thirty-five different Events trigger at random intervals, injecting narrative chaos that generates emergent war stories. Players consistently described their CC sessions as producing memorable narratives in a way few other wargames achieved. A random scenario generator provided near-infinite replayability. The net effect was a game that felt chaotic and narrative like real small-unit combat but was far simpler than ASL, making it accessible to a wider audience while satisfying grognards. Jensen was also praised for writing some of the clearest, most readable rulebooks in the hobby. Also designed Dominant Species (GMT’s third best-selling game of all time, a competitive eurogame about animal survival during an Ice Age) and Fighting Formations. Worked with GMT Games throughout his career. Passed away from pancreatic cancer at 52. The Chad Jensen Memorial Breakthrough Designer Award was established in his honor in 2023 to recognize outstanding new designers entering the wargaming field.
David Thompson — Defense analyst by day, arguably the most commercially successful designer working in the space between eurogames and wargames. Came to wargame design from eurogames rather than the other way around, which means his instinct is to ask “how do I make this accessible?” before “how do I simulate this?” The Undaunted series (co-designed with Trevor Benjamin, Osprey Games) uses deck-building as the core engine driving tactical WWII combat. Drawing cards determines what you can do each turn, and casualties remove cards from your deck, simulating attrition through a eurogame mechanic. Undaunted: Normandy, North Africa, Stalingrad, Battle of Britain, and subsequent volumes have been commercially successful enough to reach mainstream game stores, not just hobby shops. War Chest (AEG, also with Benjamin) replaced deck-building with bag-building for abstract tactical combat. General Orders fuses worker-placement with hex-map wargaming. Pavlov’s House (DVG) introduced a triptych battlespace structure for solitaire play: three interconnected boards representing tactical, operational, and strategic scales of the same battle. Thompson’s consistent output demonstrates that historical conflict games built on modern eurogame production values and accessible mechanics can sell at scale. Multiple Charles S. Roberts Awards and Golden Geek Awards. His games function as gateway wargames that teach genuine tactical concepts (suppression, fog of war, combined arms) to audiences who would never touch a hex-and-counter game.
Ryan Heilman — Designer (with Dave Shaw) of Brave Little Belgium, White Eagle Defiant, and Lucky Little Luxembourg (CSR Award winner), all published by Hollandspiele. Also a developer, graphic designer, and manual formatter who has worked behind the scenes on numerous wargames, including formatting most of the author’s own rulebooks for Conflict Simulations LLC. A former history and technology teacher whose WWI interest traces back to purchasing Avalon Hill’s Guns of August for a school report. Now serves on the Charles S. Roberts Awards Board of Governors and presented the awards at Origins 2025. His designs prioritize asymmetric experiences and storytelling within accessible, light-to-medium complexity frameworks. Co-founded Wharf Rat Games in 2024 with Wes Crawford.
Adam Starkweather — System architect and advocate for modernization in wargame design. Created the Grand Tactical Series at Multi-Man Publishing (The Devil’s Cauldron, which reached #1 wargame on BGG), then moved to Compass Games in 2016 where he built the Company Scale System (Saipan, Fulda Gap, The Little Land), the Operational Scale System (Vietnam: Rumor of War, Test of Faith), and the Doomsday Project series covering hypothetical Cold War conflicts with nuclear and chemical escalation modeled as game mechanics. Also developed nearly all titles in MMP’s International Game Series, translating Japanese wargame designs (A Victory Lost, Fire in the Sky, Warriors of God) for Western audiences and broadening the hobby’s design influences. His design philosophy is purpose-driven: every rule must serve a clear function, and making a game streamlined requires more effort than making it complex. Vocal about the need for modernized graphic design and accessibility in wargaming. Conducts 50–75+ playtests per game using VASSAL. One of the more prolific active designers with four distinct systems across multiple scales, each tailored to its subject rather than forcing a single framework onto different conflicts.
Wes Crawford — Designer of The Pursuit of John Wilkes Booth (with Heilman) and Engine Thieves: The Great Locomotive Chase (Compass Games), both games focused on small-unit raids and manhunts, an underdeveloped area of Civil War gaming. A professional drummer for over a decade (touring with entertainer Jane L. Powell, winning Entertainer of the Year and Jazz Act of the Year in 1990) before spending 28 years teaching at Goucher College, Crawford returned to game design after rediscovering his Avalon Hill collection in a basement tub around 2018. His designs emphasize deep primary-source research and meaningful player agency in situations where historical individuals faced compressed, high-stakes decisions. Co-founded Wharf Rat Games with Heilman in Baltimore, with a business model focused on quality over quantity: one game at a time, light-to-medium weight, solitaire-capable, with faster time-to-market than traditional wargame publishers. Their debut title is A Forlorn Hope by Hermann Luttmann, a WWI push-your-luck game about crossing No Man’s Land.