The Man After Roberts

Most tabletop histories know Charles S. Roberts as the father of commercial board wargaming.

That is fair. Roberts created Tactics, founded Avalon Hill, and published Gettysburg. He built the first real model for a boxed historical wargame sold to civilians: map, counters, rules, chart, and argument all inside one package.

But Avalon Hill almost died before the hobby it helped create had learned to stand.

By the early 1960s, the company was in debt. Distributors failed. The early wargame market was not yet large enough to absorb the ambition Roberts had poured into it. In 1963, Roberts turned the company over to creditors. The founder left. The structure remained.

The man who stayed was Tom Shaw.

Shaw had come into Avalon Hill as a friend of Roberts and a designer in his own right. He had already published sports strategy games under his own small company before Avalon Hill bought the rights and brought him aboard. When the company was reorganized under Monarch, Shaw became the bridge between Roberts’s founding vision and the long middle period when Avalon Hill became the most important name in American hobby wargaming.

That is not as clean as a single masterpiece.

It may be more important.

Football Without The Football

Shaw’s clearest personal design breakthrough was Football Strategy.

The game began outside Avalon Hill, then entered the catalog after Roberts bought Shaw’s company and hired him. Google Arts and Culture, using an object from The Strong National Museum of Play, lists Football Strategy as a 1960 Avalon Hill game designed by Thomas N. Shaw. Other sources trace Shaw’s original tube-packaged version to the late 1950s.

The idea was simple, sharp, and different from the usual sports game.

Football Strategy did not ask players to flick a ball, move athletes around a toy field, or imitate the spectacle of a quarterback throwing deep. It asked players to think like coaches. One player chose an offensive play. The other chose a defensive alignment. The result came from the matchup.

Dice barely mattered. Prediction mattered.

That design choice gave the game a surprising psychological charge. You were not simulating the body of football. You were simulating the mind of football: tendency, bluff, counter-bluff, and the fear that your opponent knew what you were about to call.

Codex99’s history of football games describes the Avalon Hill edition as built around offensive plays cross-indexed against defensive formations, with die rolls used only in limited situations. The point was outguessing another human being.

That was a real contribution. Sports games had often tried to reproduce action. Shaw treated sport as decision structure. In doing so, he made a game that felt quiet on the table and fierce in the head.

It also gave Avalon Hill a non-wargame pillar. Football Strategy, Baseball Strategy, and later related sports titles helped show that the company’s simulation vocabulary did not have to stay on battlefields.

The Avalon Hill House Style

Avalon Hill’s early catalog was not one thing.

It had historical battles, sports games, business games, abstract strategy, and educational oddities. Web-Grognards’ Avalon Hill ludography makes the pattern plain: before 1970, more than eighty percent of the company’s games were designed by either Roberts or Shaw. That was the old publisher model. A small house, a few core creators, and a catalog shaped by internal judgment.

Shaw’s name appears across that early period in different ways.

He is tied to Air Empire, C&O/B&O, Baseball Strategy, Battle of the Bulge, Bismarck, Blitzkrieg, Waterloo, Word Power, Stock Market, and Kriegspiel in various catalogs, credits, and retrospective notes. Some were direct design credits. Some were co-designs. Some were development, expansion, graphics, naming, or practical production work. In a later Baseballgames interview, Shaw himself gave a candid list: he said he expanded Roberts’s Afrika Korps, developed additional cases for Verdict II, created a board game version of Reader’s Digest Word Power, developed a simplified version of Jim Dunnigan’s Outdoor Survival, and made The Stock Market Game.

That mixture tells the truth better than a clean list would.

Shaw was not only sitting in a room inventing games from blank paper. He was helping Avalon Hill make products. Sometimes that meant designing. Sometimes it meant simplifying. Sometimes it meant fitting a game to a market. Sometimes it meant telling a brilliant young designer that the thing in front of him needed work before it could survive a retail shelf.

That is development.

And development is one of the hidden arts of tabletop publishing.

The General

One of Shaw’s most important creations was not a boxed game.

It was a magazine.

The General became Avalon Hill’s house organ in 1964, and it did something the company desperately needed. It gave isolated players a way to feel like they belonged to a hobby. It published strategy articles, variants, answers, commentary, ratings, opponent listings, and company news. It taught people how to keep playing games that otherwise might have died after a few sessions at one kitchen table.

In the Baseballgames interview, Shaw drew the line carefully. He said Roberts had the idea for an in-house gaming magazine, but that it was not implemented until after the creditor takeover. Shaw described himself as the founder in May 1964 and editor through 1972, then said hiring Don Greenwood was his greatest decision as an Avalon Hill executive.

That is a remarkable sentence.

It shows how Shaw understood his own role. He was proud of the thing he started, but he also knew when to hand it to someone who could carry it farther. Greenwood would become central to Avalon Hill’s later identity. Shaw helped bring him in.

A game company needs more than games. It needs a conversation around the games. The General was that conversation. It made Avalon Hill feel less like a manufacturer and more like the headquarters of a serious hobby.

For a generation of wargamers, that mattered.

Running The Hill

Shaw’s most durable contribution may be the least romantic one: he ran the company.

After Roberts left, Shaw remained the last holdover from the original Avalon Hill. Several histories describe him as the person who ran the company during the successful Monarch Avalon years. Web-Grognards says the new company would be run by Tom Shaw. Wikipedia’s Roberts entry says Shaw ran Avalon Hill during the successful 1963 to 1982 period. The Digital Antiquarian calls him Avalon Hill’s longest-serving employee, a game designer, and the founding editor of The General.

By 1983, the Washington Post was quoting him as Avalon Hill’s executive vice president during the company’s move into computer gaming. The article captures Shaw thinking like a publisher who understood both sides of the table. Board games, he said, were built around head-to-head play, one player outplaying another. Computer games needed the challenge of beating the machine.

That distinction sounds obvious now. In 1983, it was not.

Avalon Hill was trying to move from cardboard to software without losing the simulation mindset that defined it. Shaw saw that a direct conversion was not enough. A computer did not simply replace a board. It changed the opponent, the market, and the design problem.

His comments in that article are blunt in the old Avalon Hill way. He believed game design was a natural gift, not merely a learned technical skill. He worried that good programmers were not automatically good game designers. He wanted gamers who could learn to program, not programmers who happened to need a product.

You can argue with that philosophy. Many people would.

But it reveals something important about Shaw’s worldview. For him, a game was not just rules, code, or components. It was judgment. It had to be wrung out through playtesting, instinct, and human reading of what made a challenge hold.

That is the same instinct behind Football Strategy.

What He Actually Built

Thomas N. Shaw did not create Avalon Hill.

He did not invent the hex-and-counter wargame. He did not design the company’s biggest later classics. He did not have the clean authorial profile of a designer whose name sits alone on one immortal box.

What he built was continuity.

He gave Avalon Hill sports simulations that modeled choice instead of spectacle. He designed and co-designed early catalog games. He developed and simplified the work of others. He founded The General as the house magazine that held the audience together. He helped hire Don Greenwood. He ran the company after Roberts left and kept Avalon Hill moving through the fragile years when commercial wargaming could easily have become a dead branch.

That is why his legacy can be hard to see.

A foundation does not usually sign its name across the roof.

Shaw’s work was institutional. It lived in product schedules, editorial decisions, playtest processes, customer mail, magazine columns, and the stubborn belief that people would pay serious money for serious games if the company taught them why those games mattered.

That belief helped preserve the market Roberts had opened.

The Limit

There is a reason Shaw’s designer reputation is smaller than his company reputation.

His credited games are uneven. Football Strategy remains the cleanest expression of his personal design voice. Bismarck, Waterloo, Blitzkrieg, Battle of the Bulge, and other early Avalon Hill titles are historically important, but their credits and development histories are tangled. Kriegspiel is remembered partly for trying to bring the Football Strategy matrix idea into wargaming, and even sympathetic Avalon Hill commentary has not treated it as a triumph of design.

Shaw was not primarily a late-career systems innovator.

He became a company man in the best and most limiting sense. As his responsibilities grew, his personal design authorship became harder to isolate. He made Avalon Hill work, and that meant giving more and more of the visible design future to other people.

That is not a failure. It is a trade.

The company got stability. The hobby got Avalon Hill. Shaw got a legacy that is more often felt in the shape of a catalog than in the rules of one game.

Where To Find The Work

Shaw has since died. The Tabletop Gaming Hall of Fame lists Tom Shaw with an asterisk, its marker for members who have passed away, and identifies him as a 1976 inductee, a wargame designer, and founder of The General Magazine. Public sources do not make a clean death date easy to verify, so the honest close is not a date. It is the shelf.

Football Strategy survives as a collector’s item and museum object, including the example held by The Strong and shown through Google Arts and Culture. Old Avalon Hill games tied to Shaw remain in the collector market. The General is archived, indexed, discussed, and remembered by the players who learned to think in Avalon Hill’s language.

Avalon Hill itself now exists as a Hasbro brand, far removed from the small Baltimore company Shaw helped keep alive. But the old boxes still speak. Flat maps. Thick rules. Combat tables. Sports charts. A magazine telling you that other people cared about this strange, serious pastime too.

Shaw did not build the hobby alone.

He was one of the people who kept the lights on long enough for the hobby to become real.