Stuart Dagger - Britain and Ireland

This section contains the columns of Stuart Dagger, who will be reporting from Britain and Ireland.

About Stuart Dagger:

Stuart Dagger is the editor of Counter. He was born in Lancashire in 1944 and after studying mathematics at the universities of Manchester and Warwick, became an academic, spending his career at the University of Aberdeen. He is now retired.

He was a keen chess player in his teens but switched to bridge in his early twenties. The discovery that while he'd been growing up so had commercial boardgames came in 1974 with the discovery of the game Diplomacy and the magazine Games & Puzzles. That led to him becoming part of the British pbm scene. The writing began in the late eighties, initially with Games International and then with Sumo, to which he was a contributor throughout its run. When Sumo ceased publication at the start of 1998, Mike Clifford and Alan How asked him to join them in trying to produce a successor which would continue the Sumo spirit. That was Counter and it has appeared quarterly ever since.

Stuart lives in Aberdeen, in the North East of Scotland.

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Headlines July 13, 2006 - Stuart Dagger: Canal Mania: A Preview January 6, 2006 - Stuart Dagger: British and Irish Publishers

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Articles

Stuart Dagger: Canal Mania: A Preview

The most important event of 1776, and let no one tell you any different, was the building of the Worsley to Manchester canal.  It was the first in Britain and it triggered a rash of similar projects across the country.  Between them they created a network that provided the transport system necessary for the Industrial Revolution.  Their history has been largely forgotten by most of us, because in the middle of the next century their role was usurped by the railways, and if we are interested in transport history at all, it is usually the early railways that capture our imaginations.  It is the old story that when it comes to the writing of history, it is the winners that get to tell the tale.  Nonetheless, the story of the canals and the men who built them is an interesting one, and this latest game from the Ragnar Brothers takes it as its inspiration.

This is not going to be a review.  I shall be writing a review for the next issue of Counter, and if you think that an editor is going to start scooping his own magazine, you are seriously deluded!  In any case, my copy of the game only arrived this morning and I haven’t yet played it.  What I am going to do instead is give you more information than you can get from the website, so that you’ll be in a better position to decide whether the game is the sort that interests you.  The print run is not a large one, and we are all familiar with situations where a game sells out before we have realized that we wanted a copy.  This should help you avoid that.

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Stuart Dagger: British and Irish Publishers

When I was a child, Britain had a healthy boardgames industry in the shape of Waddingtons and Spears.  Between them they had the UK licenses for leading American games such as Monopoly, Careers and Scrabble, and they also generated some good ones of their own—Cluedo from Waddingtons being the most famous.  There was nothing like the flood of new titles that gamers are faced with these days, but there was enough to keep me and my friends happy and for “the latest game from Waddingtons” to be a sensible thing for a bright 11 year-old to put at the top of the list of things he would like for Christmas.  However, that was back in the early fifties.  In the late fifties two things happened: I discovered chess and bridge, which cost them one customer, and the British public fell in love with television, which must have cost them a lot more.

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