Interviews by an Optimist #102 - George Phillies

Interviewed by Tom Vasel
Edited by Tom Vasel and Laura Vasel
May 27, 2006

George says this about himself…

I was born July 23, 1947 in Buffalo, New York, attended grade school in Kenmore, New York, and finished Junior High School and High School in Williamsville, New York. As a small child my father and grandfather taught me checkers and chess and chinese checkers. Games with some skill, such as Clue, were regular Christmas and birthday presents. In 1958, I spotted the Avalon Hill ad in the Scientific American, and was soon collecting board wargames. In 1964 I went off to MIT, and with Stanley Hoffman co-founded what would eventually be the MIT Strategic Games Society, which is at least one of the oldest college gaming groups in the world. In 1965-1967 I co-edited The Tank, the MITSGS newsmagazine, which was one of the first two or three boardgaming zines of any note. I eventually earned bachelor’s, master’s, and D.Sc. degrees at MIT, (physics, and an extra bachelor’s degree in life sciences), spent three years at UCLA as a postdoc, and then went off first to the University of Michigan and now WPI as a faculty member. I was an active member of the International Federation of Wargaming from its earliest days until it finally collapsed in 1972. In 1973 a group of us at MIT founded the American Wargaming Association, which later became the Strategy Gaming Society, in which I was an active member until 2003 (I still belong).

In the early 1970s, I edited the Guide to Wargaming Periodical Literature, later History of Wargaming Quarterly, which listed every article in every known wargaming magazine, sorted by topic. Pre-computer, HWQ was an enormous burden to produce. It would now be far easier, but less interesting. Too many games. Too few articles.
Along the way, I became a collector of board wargames. I took over from Jeff Pimper editing Pimper’s All the World’s Wargames, whose fifth volume is now about to be printed. Pimper’s is in its five volumes and supplement lists 3800 board wargames. I am saddened to report that I only own about 3300 of them.

At the start of 2004 I began a new gaming magazine, Game!, to which Tom Vasel is a leading contributor. Game! is an excellent way not to make money, though with electronic publication via Game Table Online http://www.gametableonline.com and modern computer software it is far less work to produce than The American Wargamer had been. Back then, articles were produced on typewriters, and paste-up was done, quite literally, with rubber cement. Now MS Publisher does all the work.

This fall, I will be teaching a new course on Design of Tabletop Strategy Games at WPI. For that course, I will need several textbooks. The first of these, Contemporary Perspectives in Game Design, which I am writing with Tom Vasel, is 85% complete.

I also write science fiction, and have a short story forthcoming in the new prozine Baen’s Astounding Science Fiction. My other books are available at Third Millennium http://www.3mpub.com . My new novel The Minutegirls is about to appear from them. My game collection deigns to share its Worcester, MA town house with me, until it moves into far larger quarters this Summer. I bought a Worcester home, which is now being renovated.

Tom Vasel: Tell us about the reasons you started up Game!

George Phillies: I have been publishing gaming magazines on and off since 1965, when I was co-editor of the MIT Strategy Gaming Society magazine THE TANK. THE TANK was one of the first board wargaming magazines published after the AH General. I briefly published a magazine on AH Stalingrad, the Stalingrad Review. In 1973, Kevin Slimak, Mark Swanson, Rod Burr, and I founded the American Wargaming Association as a replacement for the defunct International Federation of Wargaming. Its newsletter was The American Wargamer. After a merger, the AWA became the Strategy Gaming Society, and American Wargamer became Strategist. On an irregular basis, I would spend years as the Strategy Gaming Society Editor, an elective post. A few years ago, the SGS membership decided on a new direction for the Society, one that I felt was ill-advised, so I served out my term and declined to run for re-election.

I was fond of editing, and had some specific ideas for a better magazine. In particular, it would focus on electronic circulation via PDF, with other people handling the subscriptions, http://www.MagWeb.Com handling back article archives, and a hobby outlet handling the paper issues. Because the main circulation was electronic, I would not have to suffer length restrictions.

My original thought of a title was INTERNATIONAL GAMER, with a back reference to INTERNATIONAL WARGAMER, but one of my hoped-for contributing editors had ties to the International Gaming Awards, and had legitimate fears that the names were confusing. The magazine after some thought became GAME!, readers being GAME!rs, GAME! being the International Gaming magazine. Weare now in our third year of publication.

The financial model for GAME! is a bit complicated, except for the bottom line, which is that I lose money on the effort. I have electronic subscriptions, archive, sales, and have had paper and back issue sales. I still lose money, though less than if I had no subscribers.

I had had a positive relationship with Joe and Kath Minton, who are behind http://www.GameTableOnline.Com , and offered them the chance to use my new magazine as a membership benefit for Game Table Online. This arrangement worked very well for both sides. The Hobby Outlet was Homer Games, with which we had a successful arrangement until their finances folded up and they went out of business. I am now looking for someone in the US who would be interested in licensing on a royalty basis (you pay when you sell, not before) the rights to sell paper and back issues of Game!

Tom Vasel: Why print on paper, when the internet is so handy?

George Phillies: The internet is only handy for people who have it and use it. For something as large as a magazine, a highspeed connection and a good printer become necessary. Only about two-thirds of the population has email at all, and not all of the two-thirds want to go through the trouble to print an entire magazine. If we were electronic-only in our circulation, we would lose a substantial part of our potential market.
In practice, we have a certain number of subscribers at GameTableOnline, and had roughly a similar number of sales through Homer Games while they were active. We have more people looking through MagWeb than we have subscribers.

Tom Vasel: How do you determine what articles to include?

George Phillies: I try to cultivate literate writers. I am following the example of Don Greenwood, whose Panzerfaust magazine was excellent because Don was able to obtain a wide range of first rate writers who would turn out a good article every month. I have been very fortunate to find a group of prolific, thoughtful people who write on a range of different topics, people like Susan Rozmiarek, Greg Schloesser, Greg Costikyan, Mary Kuhner, Russell Lockwood, and the inimitable Tom Vasel. I have two playing groups that submit diaries, so you can read what other gamers are actually playing. I search the news for interesting articles, though that is less and less successful. I do sometimes find a good series article, such as the current Scratchware Manifesto and the series
last year on styles of rolegaming.

I do my own game reviews, truly short reviews, largely about board wargames.

My single most popular article is the convention listings. Through a diligent search of other gaming magazines, the internet, and other contacts, I have (probably) the best list of gaming conventions in any magazine.

My frustrations are finding articles on board wargames and miniatures. These are extremely difficult to locate, allowing you want decent articles rather than brief notes.

Having procured a range of articles from writers, I then try for a range of topics: Old games. Very new releases. Simple games; games for young children. Very complex games. I do what I can, and am not always equally successful.

Tom Vasel: What kind of subscriber base do you have?

George Phillies: There are three subscriber bases. The first is the players at GameTable Online http://www.gameTableOnline.com , some thousands of them, who get an occasional sample issue, and who on occasion subscribe. This number is expected to increase appreciably once it becomes feasible to use PayPal for certain types of periodic order. The second is the readers of MagWeb http://www.magweb.com, who account for thousands of contacts per quarter to our articles. Finally, we have had a paid readership of paper issues, though that operation came to a stop last summer.

Tom Vasel: How are you involved at GameTable Online?

George Phillies: We have a commercial arrangement involving the distribution of Game! People can subscribe to Game! through their site. In return, they have an exclusive license to sell electronic subscriptions. I receive part of the subscription fees. I have exclusive editorial control of Game! I play no role in their electronic gaming plans.

Tom Vasel: What do you think about playing board games online? Is it equal to the face-to-face experience?

George Phillies: There are challenges to playing board games on line, especially if there are complicated move sequences. You may be able to summon random numbers, but games with card decks are a challenge. On the other hand, when moves are being exchanged on line, the opportunities for analysis are much more profound, in that people no longer expect instant response. Analysis depth was also high in online chess play before computer programs challenged the correspondence play situation.

Equal? Much depends on which game is in question and why the game is played. For a serious tactical game like Stalingrad, there are far more profound opportunities for analysis. If you are playing a game as part of a social or family event, the online part blocks matters. The computer cannot handle critical commands like “Please pass the chocolate brownies”. Now, I would not have thought that you could readily set up a method for playing rolegames over the computer, at least in the style I say used in the 1970s, but it turns out that this is entirely practicable, and is done on a large scale.

For orthodox board games, there are several sets of computer software that in principle appreciably transmit game moves, for example the Cyberboard software. I have actually never used any of these, and cannot say much about how satisfactory the interfaces are.

For my rare playing opportunities, I tend to prefer playing in person, because at the same time that I am playing I also have social interaction with the other players.

Tom Vasel: What are your personal favorite games?

George Phillies: The game I most commonly play currently is Space Empires IV, which is a computer tactical game. I am fond of Stalingrad, the old Avalon Hill effort. There are a variety of other games that use the same tactical arrangements, which I also enjoy. I did enjoy GDW Torgau.
Of rolegames, I like Champions, Third Edition, though I have not recently had a set of opponents. The group I was in played it as a character interaction game, not as a combat game, at least usually. I will sometimes play something new that the real analysts have not had time to work through in complete detail. As a general statement, I am not fond of games whose rules go on for dozens of pages, and market sales of board wargames tend to indicate that most other people are not either. The classical board wargame market has imploded, and I believe the fault lies with the industry, not with changes in styles. If you pander to people who want more and more and more complicated rules, eventually you lose your market with everyone else. However, most everyone else does not object, they just drift away.

Tom Vasel: Tell us about your huge collection of games. Why own so many?

George Phillies: I have been in the military gaming hobby for 50 years, rather before most readers were born. When Avalon Hill games first came out, it was more or less normal that everyone who was in the hobby bought and learned how to play most of the games as they appeared. After some of the more recent AH releases, say Anzio or Guadalcanal, that habit tended to fade, but with occasional interruptions I have bought most board wargames as they appeared. My collection has gaps, and tends to lag reality a bit, so of the approximately 3800 games in The Collector Supreme’s data base, I actually only own about 3300 of them.

However, I am rather fond of having a reasonably if not perfectly complete collection, so if someone asks me if I own Poland 1939 my response can be ‘which one?’ I am off hand able to recall four or five different games having that title. Similarly, if you ask me about Strategy 1, I remember the MCPCML game of that title, and the more recent SPI game of the same title.

In recent years, complications arose because my collection started to run me out of space in my townhouse, not to mention that floor loading considerations indicated that I should not try storing my entire magazine collection in filing cabinets upstairs. Rather, the collection would be stored in the basement, and the question was whether the second and first floors would also be in the basement or not. I have 8 4-drawer filing cabinets full of magazines, and I believe that is the larger half of my collection, but not more. My new house has 4200 finished square feet, including 1700 square feet on a concrete pad for heavy object storage.

Having a complete collection lets me do other things. For example, I now publish GAME! magazine, available electronically as a “Benefit” at http://www.gametableonline.com . I can run reviews for all these games. I have been publishing gaming magazines for 40 years, since 1965, but in many ways GAME! is the best of the lot, in no small part to my many excellent writers, notably Tom Vasel.

The game collection has also supported a lateral shift in my professional career. I intend to continue my real physics research on the dynamics of complex fluids. However, a variety of difficulties convinced me that I should take advantage of a recent development of my university, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

WPI recently launched a new undergraduate majors program in “Interactive Media and Game Development”. At most schools majors with this name are run out of commercial art programs or out of computer science departments. WPI is close to unique in that we require our majors to have a facility with art and with computer programming, though we expect students to emphasize one or the other in their work. It occurred to me that it is very nice to say that our graduates can write brilliant code or that our graduates include the second Michelangelo. However, if you are going to design a game, you actually have to worry about *content*. This radical idea appears in very few formal game design curricula. You have to worry about features such as depth, replay value, branching width, theme, dead time ...all these issues that you talk about in your reviews and musings.

Furthermore, many games have a military theme. Students who design military games usefully ought to have some idea of what a flank of a military unit is, or why you might want to find it. They might want to know why OVER THE TOP WITH GAUSS RIFLES is inadvisable as a military tactic, why idiots talk about weapons, amateurs talk about tactics, and professionals talk about logistics and training. I therefore want to spend some time talking about small and large unit military operations, with ground readings I have not chosen yet and segments from Fleet Tactics for people interested in naval warfare.

There are no good books on details of design of board wargames. If you look at computer games featuring large units, a lot of them have truly primitive game features, comparable with miniatures games from the 50s. Notions like stacking, gridding, zones of control, and multiple unit attacks are foreign to them. Indeed, I found an otherwise rational book on computer game design that thinks that in a board wargame the units shoot at each other, with a probability of hitting, target units being destroyed as if you were playing Battleship. I intend to work into the course many of the nuts and bolts game design issues not available elsewhere.

Finally, there is all this interest in Eurogames, which I might call resource-limited games and cooperative games. There are lots of pieces in Eurogame design, but many of the choice elements resolve to resources, counting ‘actions you may take in a turn’ as a resource.

In the end, our terms run 7 weeks, 28 lectures and 7 lab sessions, and in that time the students will have a final objective: Design a game and have a prototype out there with passage through two playtesting sessions.

What material will the students have to study? Well, there is Jim Dunnigan’s book, and perhaps Nicky Palmer’s book. For contact with reality, there are all your interviews. There are various people who do useful reviews. I am going to be writing a book, likely starting as lecture notes, focusing on such things as ‘how can you grid a map, and why?’ How do the map and the rules interrelate? What are those little square cardboard things?

And that takes me back to my collection, because a key reason I am qualified to teach the course is that I have this uniquely enormous resource base, namely I own 3300 or so board wargames, several of which I designed myself.

Tom Vasel: Tell us about these games that you’ve designed…

George Phillies: There are really three, namely Strategy 1, Super D-Day, and Fall of Manjukuo. I also did the artwork for Madrid Two.

Super D-Day is really not a new game but a ‘combine old pieces in new ways’. It required an Avalon Hill D-Day game and two German armies with units of different color. Color control that long ago was not up to modern standards, so two D-Day sets would often give you red Germans and orange Germans. The map was divided roughly on the river line through Paris. The two sides fight it out with replacements of 15 attack factors (plus 1/2 attack factor per captured enemy city) per turn, using AH D-Day rules except paratroops, supply and sea invasions. The objective is to push the other side off the map.

The key to the game interest was that an AH D-Day German army had an enormously rich mixture of units, from 1-2-2 static infantry to 7-7-4 tank divisions, so one had to be clever to extract as much value as possible from each unit. Play showed the game was tactically rich.

Strategy 1 was designed for the Multiple Commander Play by Mail League whose magazine TANK was first published in 1966. TANK, which I edited, was likely the first amateur board wargaming magazine. The MCPBML was organized to give a play experience that is still very rarely seen, namely that each side would have a supreme commander who would give approximate orders to his subordinate commanders, who actually got to move the units and fight battles. The MCPBML had started this with traditional AH games, but there had only been limited success because the games available in 1965 were just not suited to that sort of play. Strategy 1 had a 50x75 square board and several hundred units on each side, enough so that single errors would not end the game, enough so that if attrition set in all commanders would have something to do, and enough that both levels of player had something worth doing. The two forces were symmetric in unit composition, but the map was not filled with mirror images of terrain (excepting the two religious sanctuary squares). Roughly speaking, these were 1935 armies with tank units but no air forces or paratroopers.

I said and meant ‘squares’. However, a diagonal move cost 1.5 rather than 1, so the terrain distortion was less than with hexagons. We used squares because hex paper was not commercially available; you had to draw your own full-size map from a small copy, and squares were easier to draw than are hexagons. An important innovation was the first use of megahexes, under the name “strategic squares”, which were 5x5 groups of playing squares. Supreme command orders could be limited to the Strategic Squares, and limited intelligence rules could obscure below the strategic squares where units were located behind the lines. Limited Intelligence was not actually new. Charles Roberts used it in Tactics II. However, the MCPBML used gamesmasters, and therefore the limit on intelligence could be made more complex.

The core design issue was that the MCPBML wanted a game that might work for multiple commander--two-level play. Games of this sort require 6 or 8 players, which is still a lot. It was not then successful. Remember, we are discussing the period in which you might buy an airmail stamp to get your letters to California more quickly, and in which long distance phone time was expensive. (A computer was a box the size of a room that cost millions of 2005 current dollars.) Multiple copies of orders could be made using carbon paper on your typewriter. Also, most of the players were college students with irregular schedules and interests. Under modern conditions, a group of adults interested in hex based games could actually run Strategy I (you might want a new board and rules) successfully, and it would be a very different gaming experience.

Madrid II was a 1965 hex-based 7 player game, basically a Diplomacy Variant using hex based mapping and rules, based on the Spanish Civil War. I drew the map. It was the first hex based game, to my knowledge, that used simultaneous movement with a referee. I drew the map on hex spirit master stencils on which the grid had been imprinted using a steel master that the MITSGS at that time owned, using a stack of colored masters to produce, e.g., blue rivers. (The map was by the standards of the time polychromatic.)

Fall of Manjukuo was an effort to create a game using the very successful Stalingrad formula. I doubled the size of the German and Russian armies, roughly speaking--the Russians get two German armies, and the Japanese get two Russian Armies--and drew monochrome a hex map of Manchuria, Korea, and North China, plus bits of Russia and Mongolia. I did try replacing the German tank corps with corps support units, which could stack on top of regular units, so that the Russians invading Manchuria faced very nearly the same combat factor counting conundrums that are faced by a German player in Stalingrad. In retrospect, the Japanese should not be allowed to stack their 7-10-3 infantry corps. A significant strategic difference between Stalingrad and Manjukuo is that the Japanese start with a very wide front that later narrows. In contrast, in Stalingrad the Russian line starts short and gets longer as the game goes on. I then found a pair of Army War College studies of the campaign--the largest and fastest blitzkrieg operation of World War II, and the 3rd largest campaign in terms of forces involved--so that I could put historical unit designations on the counters we had already designed and assigned combat factors. The combat factors were chosen in an effort to create a balanced game, using the precise combat factor values used in Stalingrad. Most of the combat and movement rules are very much like Stalingrad, though the Japanese player does have limited sea movement options.

Limited play indicated that the game turned out reasonably in the sense that both players had to work hard for victory--the Russians had a number of turns to capture cities in the Japanese rear, but there were a lot of Japanese soldiers and much interesting terrain in the way. I am not sure that the size of the two armies, the replacement rates, or the game length does not need some tuning.

I viewed Fall of Manjukuo as a successful design. In two hostile reviews, several people who think historical accuracy is a desirable feature in board wargames were happy to foam at the mouth. One review was rather cursory by someone who appeared to have read the designer’s notes but never set up the game. I am told that one or another of the very prominent west coast designers of the period totally loathed the game for the designer’s notes, in which I made clear that I thought that historical accuracy was an undesirable game feature that worked against your chances of design a good board war game.

Tom Vasel: So are you arguing that a good simulation does not make a good game?

George Phillies: I think it is the case that a number of people who designed simulations, especially less recently, did not care whether their simulations did or did not make good games. I raised with several prominent designers at the old SPI the question of game balance, and the response was that most people played the games solitaire and therefore it did not matter whether or not the games were balanced. The net result was that you had a lot of simulations going out the door whose playing characteristics had issues, sometimes very serious ones, e.g., only one side could win, and the other side did not even have interesting things to do. It appears to me that in the end the market did in some sense speak, in that the sales of ‘historical simulations’ has plummeted down to infinitesimal levels.

To my taste, the historical simulation people had simply lost touch with the point of the hobby, namely that they were supposed to be producing games that were fun to play, and were not altogether successful at starting a new hobby.

Tom Vasel: Who are the great board game designers, in your opinion?

George Phillies: There are a vast number of board wargame designers. (I don’t know the eurogame designers in such detail.) Two names really come to my mind: Charles Roberts. Frank Chadwick.

Charles Roberts for all practical purposes invented the board wargame, out of almost no prior art. His original board wargames, Tactics and Tactics II, have all of the standard elements of the modern board wargame, and have a number of specialized rules. Tactics II had command and control rules. It had off-board movement, but only for a limited number of units, a highly accurate representation of the limited fog of war. Tactics II also included ranged attacks, supply, and a prisoner rule more sophisticated than most found up to the current date. By modern standards, Tactics II is not incredibly sophisticated or complex, but it must be remembered that almost every rule in the game was a fresh
invention, created by the author for the first time.

Tom Vasel: George, thanks for the time you took to answer these questions! Any final thoughts for our readers?

George Phillies: Have fun!
That’s why the games are there.

And, remember,
He who dies with the most games...wins.

© 2006 Tom Vasel

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