Strategy & Tactics: The Magazine That Wanted Better Wargames

Strategy & Tactics began as a challenge to a monopoly. Christopher Wagner founded the magazine in the 1960s as an independent alternative to Avalon Hill's The General. Avalon Hill dominated commercial board wargaming, and The General existed mainly to support Avalon Hill's own products. Wagner wanted something broader and sharper: a place for design discussion, variants, criticism, hobby news, and serious analysis that did not belong to one boxed-game publisher's marketing department.

That first version of Strategy & Tactics was still a fanzine. It was made with commitment more than capital, and it quickly ran into the old problem of independent hobby publishing: the audience was passionate but small, production was exhausting, and the money did not stretch. The magazine mattered before it was profitable because it named a hunger in the hobby. Wargamers wanted more than a few conservative boxed releases a year. They wanted arguments, experiments, new topics, and a periodical that treated the hobby as an intellectual field.

James F. Dunnigan saw the opening. Dunnigan had already shown that he was willing to challenge existing designs and build historically sharper simulations. When he acquired Strategy & Tactics and formed Simulations Publications, Inc., the magazine became more than a review and variant publication. It became the production spine of a new company.

The decisive idea was the game-in-a-magazine. Instead of waiting years for a boxed title to justify itself in retail distribution, S&T could put a complete playable game inside an issue. That changed everything. A subscriber was no longer only buying articles. They were buying a recurring simulation laboratory: map, counters, rules, historical essay, and design frame delivered through the mail.

The format opened the subject field. Avalon Hill had to think about mass-market boxed-game viability. S&T could cover obscure battles, odd campaigns, operational problems, ancient wars, modern hypotheticals, and experimental systems because the magazine carried the product. A game that could never survive as a big mounted-box release might thrive as an insert.

Redmond A. Simonsen made the revolution legible. His graphic design work gave wargames a professional visual grammar: clear counters, readable maps, consistent typography, organized charts, and a design sensibility that treated usability as part of seriousness. The magazine's impact was not only that it published games quickly. It published them in a visual language that other designers had to answer.

Strategy & Tactics needed to exist because wargaming had outgrown slow-release conservatism. The audience wanted to test history more often, with more specificity and more rigor. S&T gave them a rhythm. Every issue could become a campaign, an argument, a map, a simulation, and a new subject to learn. The magazine did not merely cover the hobby. It accelerated it.

The magazine's first problem was credibility. Wargaming was a demanding hobby, but much of its communication still looked informal. Charts, variant rules, battle reports, and design arguments circulated through clubs and newsletters. Strategy & Tactics raised the ambition. It said that a periodical about games could treat military history, probability, production, cartography, and reader criticism as parts of one serious discipline.

The move from Wagner to Dunnigan is therefore more than a change of ownership. It is the moment when a passion project became an industrial method. Dunnigan understood that the magazine could be a market, a test bed, and a publishing schedule all at once. Instead of waiting for perfect games, SPI could publish, learn, correct, and move. That was a radical rhythm for tabletop design.

The game-in-a-magazine model also changed the economics of curiosity. A boxed game about a famous battle had to be broadly appealing enough to justify retail risk. A magazine game could be narrower, stranger, and more educational. That allowed readers to explore campaigns they might never have asked for in a store. The format expanded taste by lowering the cost of experimentation.

It also changed the meaning of subscription. A subscriber was not just supporting a magazine. They were joining a pipeline of future simulations. Each issue promised a new playable problem. That promise created loyalty because it gave the reader both predictability and surprise: the cadence was stable, the subject could vary wildly.

The beginning of Strategy & Tactics should therefore be framed as a publishing invention. The magazine discovered that the article, the map, the counter sheet, and the rules booklet could form a single educational object. The reader did not only learn about history. The reader manipulated a model of it.

The game insert also changed the reader's body language. A magazine article asks for a chair and attention. A game asks for table space. Strategy & Tactics turned reading into setup, and setup into analysis. The subscriber unfolded the map, separated counters, read rules, and began to inhabit the historical problem through decisions. That was a different kind of periodical intimacy.

The beginning of S&T is therefore not only a business innovation. It is a media innovation. The magazine made the reader handle the argument. The article said what happened; the game asked what might have happened. That partnership between prose and play became the publication's signature.

The magazine also gave wargamers a shared calendar. Every new issue meant another argument entering the culture: a new battle to debate, another map to unfold, another order of battle to question, another system to praise or dismantle. That rhythm made S&T feel like the hobby thinking out loud. The games were playable objects, but they were also invitations into a community of analysis. In that sense, the magazine's beginning was not only about more products. It was about making historical simulation a recurring public conversation.

It also explains why the magazine could appeal to readers who cared about history as much as winning. The early S&T promise was not that every simulation would be perfect. It was that each issue would take a question seriously enough to model it. That seriousness made the reader a participant in historical interpretation, not just a consumer of a finished story.

Strategy & Tactics: SPI, Feedback Cards, And The Data Loop

The height of Strategy & Tactics was the SPI era, when the magazine became the flagship of the wargaming hobby and one of the strangest early examples of data-driven entertainment publishing. Dunnigan and Simonsen built a company around speed, seriousness, and feedback. S&T's readers were not passive consumers. They were a measurable design environment.

The included games were the obvious attraction. A subscriber could expect a new historical simulation on a regular schedule. Panzergruppe Guderian, Battle for Germany, PanzerArmee Afrika, Borodino, Grunt, and many other titles made the magazine a design school in serial form. Some games were elegant. Some were rough. The important thing was the pace. Wargaming became iterative.

The articles gave the games their intellectual frame. S&T was not content to say a battle happened. It asked how logistics, command, terrain, technology, doctrine, and timing shaped possible outcomes. The magazine's promise was not narrative history alone. It was history as a system that could be modeled, stressed, and replayed.

The columns deepened that promise. For Your Eyes Only treated current military affairs and technology as part of the same analytical culture. Briefings, FYI, Outgoing Mail, and Feedback Results made the magazine feel like a conversation between designers and readers. The tone could be sharp, technical, opinionated, and sometimes severe. That fit the audience. These were grognards: readers who wanted the details because the details were the game.

The feedback-card system was the hidden engine. SPI included reader-response cards with detailed questions about articles, games, concepts, and future subjects. Staff processed the data with early business computing tools, turning a mail-order audience into a market-research machine. The company could learn what readers wanted, how they rated existing games, and which future ideas were likely to sell before committing full production resources.

That system feels astonishing now because it anticipates modern analytics with paper and keypunch labor. Long before online dashboards, wishlists, social-media metrics, and preorder heat maps, S&T had a structured loop: pitch, survey, count, design, publish, rate, repeat. The readers were not only buying the magazine. They were helping steer it.

At its height, SPI controlled a vast share of the wargaming market, and S&T was its center of gravity. The magazine built designers as public figures, gave artists and cartographers a standard to meet, and made the phrase "game designer" feel like a professional identity rather than an invisible function.

That professionalism was S&T's greatest contribution. It treated recreational wargames as serious artifacts without draining them of play. A map could be beautiful and functional. A counter sheet could be data and drama. A combat results table could be a design argument. A historical article could become a playable question: what would happen if command decisions changed?

The height of S&T is therefore not just a run of famous games. It is a production culture. The magazine turned history into a recurring design challenge and turned readers into part of the decision system. It was analog, but it thought like a feedback platform.

The physical components helped create the culture. Punched counters, folded maps, rules booklets, and charts produced a tactile seriousness. The player had to prepare the game, sort units, read orders of battle, and understand terrain before play could even begin. That preparation was not separate from the history lesson. It was part of how the history entered the mind.

Simonsen's design standards made that preparation possible. Poor graphic design can turn a complex simulation into punishment. Good design lets complexity become legible. S&T's maps and counters taught the industry that visual order was not decoration. It was gameplay. A clear counter could carry unit identity, strength, movement, formation, and affiliation at a glance. A clear map could turn geography into decision pressure.

The magazine also created a shared critical vocabulary. Readers learned to talk about simulation value, chrome, playability, order of battle accuracy, fog of war, logistics, and command control. Those arguments could be fierce because they mattered. S&T had taught its audience that design decisions were historical claims. If a rule made supply irrelevant, it said something about the campaign. If a combat table made attacks too predictable, it said something about uncertainty.

The data loop intensified that culture. When readers filled out feedback cards, they were not simply rating entertainment. They were participating in the future of the line. A concept about an obscure theater might live or die by reader response. A system might be refined because players reported friction. SPI's use of computing did not make the process impersonal; it gave a passionate niche audience unusual influence over production.

That is why the SPI-era height still feels modern. It combined subscription economics, community feedback, professional design, serialized release, and niche segmentation decades before those became standard digital-business vocabulary. Strategy & Tactics was paper, cardboard, and ink, but its operating logic was startlingly contemporary.

The workload behind that cadence was enormous. Designers, developers, artists, editors, production staff, and data processors had to keep a complex machine moving on deadlines that would challenge any publisher. That pressure sometimes produced rough edges, but it also produced a body of work no slower model could have matched. The magazine's imperfections were inseparable from its velocity.

That velocity changed reader expectations. A serious wargamer no longer had to wait for the occasional major boxed release to find a new operational puzzle. Strategy & Tactics made novelty routine. It turned a niche audience into a recurring market and gave that market the pleasure of always having another campaign to learn.

The magazine also gave wargamers a shared calendar. Every new issue meant another argument entering the culture: a new battle to debate, another map to unfold, another order of battle to question, another system to praise or dismantle. That rhythm made S&T feel like the hobby thinking out loud. The games were playable objects, but they were also invitations into a community of analysis. In that sense, the magazine's beginning was not only about more products. It was about making historical simulation a recurring public conversation.

Strategy & Tactics: Bankruptcy, Survival, And The Format That Kept Moving

Strategy & Tactics did not end with SPI, but the SPI collapse is the magazine's great fracture. By the early 1980s, SPI faced pressure from inventory, distribution changes, competition, and failed ventures. TSR, the company behind Dungeons & Dragons, became the creditor that took control after SPI's bankruptcy. For many wargamers, the takeover felt like a cultural wound. The community that had helped build SPI through subscriptions and feedback suddenly saw its flagship under the control of a company whose center of gravity was fantasy roleplaying.

The bitterness around lifetime subscriptions became part of hobby memory. Whether every retelling gets the details exactly right is less important than what the anger reveals: S&T readers believed they had not only bought magazines but helped sustain an independent wargaming institution. When that relationship was broken, the damage was emotional as well as financial.

TSR published the magazine for a time, but wargaming was not its natural strength. The magazine later passed to World Wide Wargames, then to Decision Games, where it found long-term stability. Decision Games' tenure matters because it preserved the format rather than merely the name. Strategy & Tactics continued as a military history magazine with a premium game edition, eventually adding a magazine-only edition to reach bookstores and newsstands without forcing every reader to buy the game components.

That split was smart survival. It recognized that S&T had two related audiences: readers of military history and players of hex-and-counter simulations. Some wanted maps, articles, and analysis. Others wanted the full map-counter-rules package. By separating editions, the magazine could widen its reach without abandoning the game-in-a-magazine core.

Spin-offs such as World at War and Modern War showed the strength of the model. Instead of forcing every era into one publication, Strategy & Tactics Press could segment World War II, post-1945 conflicts, and broader military history. The original S&T remained active, passing 350 issues and continuing as one of the longest-running institutions in military history and wargaming publishing.

The legacy of Strategy & Tactics is enormous. It professionalized the visual language of wargaming. It trained designers to work under deadline and within component constraints. It gave obscure conflicts a playable form. It connected direct-mail subscribers into a measurable community. It influenced early computer strategy-game designers who translated hexes, zones of control, CRT logic, and operational thinking into digital form.

Most importantly, S&T made the case that a game could be a historical argument. The counters were not toys in the simple sense. They were propositions about command, morale, terrain, supply, timing, and uncertainty. The player did not only consume a battle story. They tested it.

That is why Strategy & Tactics belongs in tabletop magazine history beside the great RPG periodicals. It solved a different problem. Dragon built fantasy culture. Dungeon fed adventure. White Dwarf trained a proprietary hobby. Strategy & Tactics built a repeating machine for turning military history into playable systems. It survived ownership disasters because the format was stronger than any one company. The map still unfolds. The counters still punch. The question still waits: what if you had commanded differently?

The TSR episode is also a reminder that a magazine can be more than its assets. A title, subscriber list, and back catalog can be acquired, but trust is harder to transfer. Strategy & Tactics had grown through a direct relationship with readers who believed the magazine understood them. When ownership changed under distress, the legal reality and the emotional reality diverged. The title survived, but the community had to decide whether the relationship did.

Decision Games' long custodianship stabilized that relationship by respecting the old format while adapting the business model. The company did not try to turn S&T into a glossy general military magazine with only nostalgic links to games. It kept the Game Edition meaningful. That continuity matters because the game insert is not a gimmick. It is the magazine's thesis in physical form.

The modern publication also benefits from a collector and preservation culture that earlier publishers could only partly imagine. Back issues, unpunched counters, errata, Vassal modules, fan indexes, and online discussions keep old games alive. A magazine issue from decades ago can still become a playable evening. That gives S&T a longer afterlife than many periodicals whose old content becomes obsolete as soon as news changes.

Its influence on digital strategy design deserves a place in the legacy. Hex maps, zones of control, combat odds, supply lines, and scenario framing all migrated into computer wargames and strategy games. Even when digital games hid the math, the design ancestry remained. Many designers learned historical systems thinking from cardboard before they coded it.

Strategy & Tactics remains active because its core promise still has a niche that no faster medium fully replaces. A video can explain a battle. A database can list orders of battle. A game can simulate conflict digitally. But S&T's format joins essay, map, component, and rule system into one object. It asks the reader to become the analyst. That is its durable gift.

The survival of S&T also shows the resilience of tactile historical play. The same decades that brought personal computers, real-time strategy games, grand-strategy simulations, and digital military sandboxes did not erase the appeal of paper maps and counters. For many players, the slower pace is the point. It allows argument, study, note-taking, and the pleasure of seeing the whole battlefield at once.

That makes Strategy & Tactics a living bridge rather than a relic. It belongs to the fanzine era, the SPI boom, the TSR wound, the Decision Games recovery, and the modern collector archive at the same time. Few tabletop magazines have carried that much history while continuing to do the original job: put a playable question inside a military history lesson.

The magazine also gave wargamers a shared calendar. Every new issue meant another argument entering the culture: a new battle to debate, another map to unfold, another order of battle to question, another system to praise or dismantle. That rhythm made S&T feel like the hobby thinking out loud. The games were playable objects, but they were also invitations into a community of analysis. In that sense, the magazine's beginning was not only about more products. It was about making historical simulation a recurring public conversation.