The die is cast. That phrase was uttered by Julius Caesar when he crossed the Rubicon and into the history books as the conqueror of Rome. Its also a reference back to my early days of gaming – when computers were still big and bulky and couldn’t hold a candle to the imagination weilded by young minds with dice in their hands and a boardgame on the table.

But these were not just ordinary boardgames, oh no. Mr. Moneybags was nowhere to be found, and the only chutes and ladders were the parachutes of airborne infantry and ladders for laying seige. These were wargames with a capital “WAR”. Nowadays of course computers are where its at. Even for wargames, and probably that’s for the better. No more cleaning up the little confetti pieces or trying to figure out what the rules said about “opportunity fire”. The computer has freed us to think about the strategy of the game, the “how to win” instead of “how to play”. You’ll see some of that here, along with some thoughts on what I think is fun, or not. You may see games that you haven’t even heard of before. Keep reading and hopefully it will get better.

As someone wise once said “I learn more about a man from an hour’s worth of play than from a lifetime of conversation”. Here’s hoping that conversation about play will stir up the same insight in a reasonable span of time.