The Kitchen Table in Catonsville

In 1952, a twenty-two-year-old Maryland National Guard officer sat at his kitchen table in Catonsville and tried to practice war. He had trained at Fort Benning. He had studied the Principles of War — mass, economy of force, simplicity, surprise. He wanted to rehearse those principles the way a chess player rehearses openings: quietly, repeatedly, against a thinking opponent. The problem was that no such tool existed. Chess was too abstract. Kriegsspiel required an umpire and belonged to the Prussian officer corps. The RAND Corporation had built hex-grid simulations, but they were classified. The consumer market offered Monopoly and Parcheesi.

Charles Swann Roberts decided to build his own. The game he designed that year — Tactics — was not a minor innovation on an existing format. It was the first commercially published board wargame. It introduced the Combat Results Table, the odds-ratio mechanic that would govern conflict resolution in every wargame published for the next seven decades. Roberts printed it himself, sold approximately two thousand copies by mail order from his garage, and netted — by his own accounting — roughly thirty dollars.

He had just invented a medium. He did not yet know it.

The Combat Results Table

Before Tactics, board games resolved conflict through binary capture (Chess) or simple dice rolls (Backgammon). Roberts introduced something fundamentally different: a probabilistic matrix where the ratio of attacking strength to defending strength determined a range of possible outcomes. Calculate your odds. Roll the die. Consult the table. The result might be “Defender Eliminated,” “Attacker Eliminated,” “Exchange,” or “Defender Retreats.” The math was simple. The implications were vast.

The CRT transformed strategic gaming from a deterministic exercise into a probabilistic one. It meant that a weaker force could occasionally hold. That a stronger force could occasionally fail. That the calculus of attack became a genuine decision — not whether you could win, but whether the odds justified the risk. This is how actual military commanders think. Roberts had encoded it into a six-column table on a piece of cardboard.

The RAND Corporation had developed concurrent odds-ratio systems in classified work around 1952 — documented in the Nash and Thrall paper “Some War Games” (RAND D-1379). Roberts conceived his CRT independently. The parallel development matters: it confirms the idea was mathematically sound. Roberts’ contribution was making it player-operated, self-contained, and commercially available. No umpire. No referee. No security clearance. Just a table, a die, and a decision.

Jim Dunnigan adopted the CRT for PanzerBlitz (1970) and built SPI’s entire catalog on variants of Roberts’ original matrix. GMT Games, the largest wargame publisher today, continues to use CRT systems that descend directly from the 1954 model. Seventy years of unbroken mechanical lineage from one kitchen table.

The Hex and the Zone

Roberts’ early games used square grids. Squares have a geometric problem: a unit moving diagonally covers more real-world distance than one moving orthogonally. In a military simulation, that distortion matters. A flanking maneuver shouldn’t be faster than a frontal advance simply because of the grid’s geometry.

Roberts did not invent the hexagonal grid. Alexander Mood at the RAND Corporation had developed hex-based wargaming boards by 1952, documented in the same Nash and Thrall paper. Roberts visited RAND, saw a photograph of their hex-grid facility, and — in his own words — “immediately saw the usefulness of this technique.” He adopted it for the 1961 revision of Gettysburg and for D-Day the same year. Movement became equidistant in all six directions. The map suddenly matched the terrain.

The hex grid became the defining visual signature of the wargaming hobby. SPI printed thousands of hex maps. GMT Games still does. The format migrated beyond wargaming entirely — Settlers of Catan, HeroScape, Civilization V. Roberts popularized and standardized what RAND had kept behind closed doors. The distinction between inventor and standardizer matters for the scoring. It does not diminish the impact.

The Zone of Control was Roberts’ cleaner claim. In Chancellorsville and the revised Gettysburg (both 1961), he formalized the idea that a military unit exerts tactical influence over adjacent hexes. Enter an enemy’s zone and you stop. You must fight. No sliding past. No ignoring the threat. This mechanic allowed two players to simulate a front line without filling every hex with a physical piece. Breakthroughs, encirclements, and flanking became possible — not as narrative descriptions, but as emergent consequences of a spatial rule. No documented commercial predecessor exists. SPI later categorized ZOC into rigid, fluid, locking, and semi-rigid variants. The concept migrated into Dungeons & Dragons as the “opportunity attack.” Roberts built the original.

The Box on the Shelf

The innovations people remember are the CRT, the hex grid, and the ZOC. The innovation people forget is the box itself.

Before Roberts, wargaming required miniatures, sand tables, painted terrain, and a referee. H.G. Wells’ Little Wars demanded a basement and a collection of lead soldiers. Kriegsspiel demanded an umpire who knew the rules better than the players. The hobby was expensive, space-intensive, and gated by expertise.

Roberts put everything in a box. A printed map. Cardboard counters with combat factors, movement factors, and NATO-standard unit symbols. A rulebook. A die. A Combat Results Table. Open the box, read the rules, play the game. No referee. No miniatures collection. No military background required. He had solved the problem of portability and completeness simultaneously.

He also put his name on the rules — a first for the industry. Before Roberts, board games were anonymous products from faceless companies. Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley did not credit designers. Roberts treated game design as authorship. This quiet decision helped create the “designer as star” culture that would later define the German board game movement, the indie RPG scene, and the modern crowdfunding era.

The Avalon Hill Years

In 1958, Roberts incorporated the Avalon Hill Game Company in Baltimore and began publishing in earnest. The timing was deliberate: the Civil War Centennial was approaching (1961–1965), and Roberts saw an opportunity to sell historical simulations to an audience hungry for the period. Gettysburg appeared in 1958 — the first historical battle simulation ever published as a commercial board game. It shipped without any playtesting. Roberts admitted this freely: it was “the first and last wargame to be introduced with no playtesting whatsoever, an omission which plagued it through numerous futile redesigns.”

Between 1958 and 1963, the catalog expanded rapidly. Tactics II refined the original CRT and added weather, supply, and airpower. Chancellorsville and D-Day brought the hex grid to the Civil War and the Western Front. Bismarck moved the system to naval warfare. Management — Roberts’ stated personal favorite — applied his simulation principles to business cycles through hidden bidding and resource allocation. Dispatcher modeled railroad logistics. Roberts was testing a hypothesis: that any complex adult activity could be simulated using his “Military Chess” architecture.

The company grew to eighteen published titles under Roberts’ leadership — nine wargames and nine civilian games. By the early 1960s, sales had surged from the original two thousand copies of Tactics to a company-wide figure that Dunnigan later estimated at over two hundred thousand games annually, though this number has not been independently verified with financial records from the period.

Tom Shaw, a high school friend hired in August 1960, designed the sports strategy line and became increasingly important to the company’s creative direction. Lindsley Schutz co-developed several later titles. Roberts’ role shifted gradually from sole designer to lead architect and publisher — a pattern visible in the attribution disputes that surround his later credits.

The Attribution Question

Roberts’ design credits are cleaner than most designers of his era, primarily because he owned the company during his entire active career. But clarity has its limits.

Eight to nine titles are clearly solo-authored: Tactics, Tactics II, Gettysburg, U-Boat, Chancellorsville, Civil War, D-Day, Dispatcher, Nieuchess, and Management. Three titles carry disputed attribution. Verdict (1959) is listed as a Roberts design by the Charles S. Roberts Awards but described elsewhere as Avalon Hill’s first outside design, by two corporate lawyers. Bismarck (1962) is credited solely to Roberts by the Awards committee but to Roberts and Tom Shaw by other sources. Afrika Korps (1964) — Roberts’ final published design — follows the same pattern, with some sources adding Lindsley Schutz as co-designer.

More importantly: many famous Avalon Hill titles are commonly misattributed to Roberts because he founded the company. Stalingrad, Waterloo, Midway, Battle of the Bulge, PanzerBlitz, Squad Leader — none of these were Roberts designs. Stalingrad and Waterloo were primarily Schutz and Shaw. PanzerBlitz was Dunnigan. Squad Leader was John Hill, published by Avalon Hill nearly two decades after Roberts’ departure. The distinction between publisher and designer is essential. Roberts designed roughly thirteen of Avalon Hill’s hundreds of titles.

The Collapse

Roberts was a brilliant architect and a struggling businessman. He designed non-standard map boards — 22 by 28 inches — that did not fit standard paper sizes, causing massive printing expenses. He launched a preschool game line that failed. He overextended into markets the company couldn’t sustain. Distribution channels disrupted.

In December 1963, Roberts planned to file for bankruptcy on the thirteenth. His creditors intervened first. Eric Dott of Monarch Services and J.E. Smith & Company took control of the company. Roberts walked away. He was thirty-three years old.

He never designed another commercially published game. He held corporate positions at Barton-Cotton Inc. and Forms Inc. He spent roughly a decade in Catholic-market publishing. He founded Barnard, Roberts and Company to publish railroad history books — a connection to his great-great-uncle Thomas Swann, who had served as president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. He designed an unpublished “second generation board wargame” in the 1970s, acknowledging influence from the designers who had built on his work: “As our early work helped today’s designers, their work in turn will help me to offer an advanced design.” The game never appeared.

Roberts died of emphysema complications on August 20, 2010. He was eighty years old.

The Propagation

The evidence that Roberts’ work propagated through the gaming industry is among the strongest for any designer in this project.

Jim Dunnigan discovered wargaming through Avalon Hill games while serving in the U.S. Army in the early 1960s. He wrote a detailed critique of their Battle of the Bulge, sent it to the company, and was commissioned to design Jutland (1967) directly for Avalon Hill. He followed with 1914 (1968) and PanzerBlitz (1970), which sold over 300,000 copies. Dunnigan then founded SPI in 1969 and adopted Roberts’ entire mechanical framework: hex grids, CRTs, cardboard counters, boxed format. Roberts acknowledged the relationship: “It takes nothing from the brilliant achievements of, say, a James Dunnigan, to point out that he had an audience of players who had graduated from basic training through the efforts of those who had gone before.”

Gary Gygax discovered Gettysburg in 1958 or 1959 and became, by his own account, obsessed. It led him to seek out more military simulations, which led to miniatures wargaming, which led to Chainmail, which led to Dungeons & Dragons. When Gygax pitched D&D to Avalon Hill in 1974, they rejected it — one of gaming history’s most cited missed opportunities. The pipeline from Roberts’ hex grid to the world’s most famous RPG runs through a single purchase in a Wisconsin game store.

GMT Games, currently the hobby’s largest wargame publisher with 47 Charles S. Roberts Awards, has built its entire catalog on the vocabulary Roberts established. Mark Simonitch, one of GMT’s most prolific designers, credits Avalon Hill as his entry point. Bruce Shelley, a former Avalon Hill game designer, co-founded MicroProse with Sid Meier — creating a direct personnel pipeline from Roberts’ tabletop foundations to digital strategy gaming.

The Charles S. Roberts Award, established in 1974–1975 by Canadian game store owner John Mansfield and formally named after Roberts in 1988, is the oldest board game award in existence, predating the Spiel des Jahres by four years. It has operated for five decades (with a hiatus from 2013 to 2018). Roberts was a charter inductee into its Hall of Fame. That the wargaming hobby’s most prestigious honor bears his name — administered without commercial sponsorship, with his daughter Joanne serving on the board of governors — testifies to a foundational influence few designers in any medium can claim.

The Honest Assessment

The critical pattern: Roberts’ individual games had real structural weaknesses. Jon Freeman’s Complete Book of Wargames dismissed Tactics II as having “no redeeming qualities” beyond historical importance — the symmetrical setup devolved into immovable battle lines against competent opponents. Gettysburg shipped unplaytested and was never fully balanced through three editions. In SPI’s 1976 reader poll, Gettysburg ranked 189th out of 205 games. Roberts was an architect whose blueprints outperformed his buildings. His systems were better as frameworks for others than as finished competitive experiences.

Roberts’ relationship to his own medium mirrors the Lumière brothers’ relationship to cinema. They built the camera and the format. They did not make the great films. Dunnigan, Hill, Gygax, and Arneson were his Méliès, his Griffith, his Eisenstein — artists who took the medium he invented and made things he could not have imagined.

What Remains

The Combat Results Table. The hexagonal grid on every wargame map printed in the last sixty years. The Zone of Control that governs every front line. The box with the map and the counters and the rules and the die. The idea that a designer’s name belongs on the product. The idea that war can be studied at a kitchen table by anyone willing to think.

Roberts designed for barely a decade. He produced thirteen games. Several of them had balance problems he never solved. He lost his company to creditors at thirty-three and spent the rest of his life publishing railroad books. And every hex-and-counter wargame published today — every CRT cross-referenced, every zone of control entered, every counter placed on a hex grid — operates within the framework he established alone, in a garage in Catonsville, Maryland, in 1952.

He was less a great game designer than a great game inventor. The distinction is precise, and it is the highest thing this methodology can say about a ten-year career.

Total: 30 points. Year: 1954.

Total: 30 points. Year: 1954.