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The Basement Where Wargaming Grew Up

In 1969, James Dunnigan bought a failing magazine called Strategy & Tactics for one dollar. He installed it in a windowless basement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, hired a staff of obsessives, and set out to do something nobody in the hobby had attempted: run wargaming like a business.

The existing model was glacial. Avalon Hill, the dominant publisher, released one or two titles per year. Each game was a standalone product, individually marketed and distributed. Dunnigan looked at this and saw a newspaper trying to operate as a book publisher. He wanted volume. He wanted data. He wanted a factory.

His solution was to include a complete, ready-to-play wargame in every issue of Strategy & Tactics. A magazine subscription became a game delivery system — predictable revenue, captive audience, rapid iteration. By the mid-1970s, SPI’s circulation surpassed six figures and outpaced Avalon Hill’s house organ. From that basement, Dunnigan built the engine that powered wargaming’s Golden Age.

The sheer output was staggering. Between 1969 and 1982, SPI published hundreds of games across every era of military history. Dunnigan personally designed or co-designed over a hundred of them. Ancient sieges, Napoleonic campaigns, hypothetical NATO-Warsaw Pact showdowns, even a simulation of the 1968 Columbia University student takeover. If it involved conflict, Dunnigan would model it.

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The Tactical Watershed

Before PanzerBlitz, commercial wargames lived at the operational and strategic level. Players moved armies across countries. Divisions were the smallest unit of maneuver. The battlefield was an abstraction viewed from a general’s desk.

Dunnigan brought the camera down to the ground.

PanzerBlitz (1970) was the first modern tactical board wargame. Individual vehicles. Platoons and companies. Tank silhouettes instead of NATO symbols. Modular mapboards you could rearrange into infinite terrain configurations — “geomorphic” maps, a term Dunnigan introduced to the hobby’s vocabulary. Combined arms doctrine taught through mechanics rather than paragraphs of rules text. And Situation 13: instructions for players to design their own scenarios, establishing user-generated content as a design principle two decades before modding became a software industry buzzword.

The market response was emphatic. PanzerBlitz sold over 320,000 copies in its first decade — the top-selling board wargame in North America for ten consecutive years. It proved that a mass audience existed for high-fidelity tactical simulation. An entire genre followed.

The design wasn’t just commercially successful. It was structurally inventive. The geomorphic map concept alone changed how designers thought about replayability. The combined arms integration turned the game into a teaching tool — players who mastered PanzerBlitz understood why infantry screens armor, why artillery suppresses before an assault, why terrain channels movement. The Pentagon noticed.

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The Paper Computer

Dunnigan codified everything he knew in The Complete Wargames Handbook (1980). It became the design bible for two generations of wargamers, hobbyist and professional alike.

His core thesis was elegant: a manual wargame is a “paper computer” — a transparent system where every working part is exposed. Unlike a digital simulation, where code can hide unrealistic assumptions, a board game forces the player to understand and execute every rule. The mechanics aren’t separate from the learning. They are the learning.

He laid out a reproducible methodology. Define the historical situation. Identify the key decision points. Choose scale and scope to reflect those decisions. Build combat results from historical casualty data. Then iterate — rapid prototyping, fast modification, test the core argument. Mark Herman, arguably the most important wargame designer of the generation that followed, describes this as the “SPI/Dunnigan method” and still uses it.

The Handbook’s deeper contribution was philosophical. Dunnigan insisted that every wargame is the designer’s argument for why things turned out as they did. Not a recreation. An argument. The designer chooses which factors matter, which to simplify, which to foreground. That transparency — the willingness to show your assumptions — is what makes a simulation useful. Hide the model and you’ve built a black box. Expose it and you’ve built a teaching tool.

This idea traveled far beyond the hobby. Military Operations Research Society workshops, Army War College curricula, DoD planning exercises — Dunnigan’s philosophy that the model should be debatable, not just executable, became foundational to professional wargaming.

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Bridging the Basement and the Pentagon

In 1977, the Office of Naval Research convened a workshop on theater-level gaming in Leesburg, Virginia. The attendees included Andrew Marshall, the legendary Director of Net Assessment for the Department of Defense. Marshall was frustrated. The professional wargaming community had never given him anything he could use.

Dunnigan, invited as an outsider from the commercial world, made a radical argument: wargames should be designed for the commander to operate directly. Not staff exercises mediated by specialists. Direct interaction. Let the decision-maker experiment with options privately, without the fear of looking foolish in front of subordinates.

Marshall awarded SPI a contract. The result was the Strategic Analysis Simulation, a global strategy model completed in 1980.

But Dunnigan’s most consequential professional partnership was with Colonel Ray Macedonia of the U.S. Army. Macedonia wanted to revive wargaming at the Army War College by injecting SPI’s research standards and modeling techniques into staff officer training. Their first collaboration, Firefight (1976), was designed for the U.S. Army Infantry School to simulate Soviet and American small-unit tactics. It was subsequently released commercially — one of the earliest “dual-use” simulations.

Macedonia and Dunnigan helped train the generation of officers who planned and executed the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Dunnigan dedicated the Wargames Handbook to Macedonia. The book remains on professional military reading lists, including the Krulak Wargaming Directorate’s recommended curriculum.

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The Collaborative Engine

SPI was not a one-man operation, and the scoring reflects that honestly.

Redmond Simonsen, a Cooper Union graduate who served as art director, professionalized the visual language of wargaming. His graphic innovations — standardized hex-map symbology, information-dense counter design, self-documenting map layouts — turned SPI products into something players could parse intuitively. Before Simonsen, wargame graphics were functional at best. After Simonsen, they were a design discipline.

Albert Nofi, a Brooklyn native with a PhD in military history, served as research director. Nofi’s academic rigor ensured that SPI’s historical models were grounded in the best available data. He co-authored several of Dunnigan’s most important books and co-founded StrategyPage.com decades later.

The trio worked in what observers described as the atmosphere of an unmade bed — informal, intense, boundary-free. Dunnigan was the systems architect and business engine. Simonsen was the interface designer. Nofi was the data layer. The collaboration was genuine, and it matters for scoring. Some of Dunnigan’s most ambitious works, including Empires of the Middle Ages, were co-designed.

This collaborative environment is why Mastery scores 9 rather than 10. The body of work is vast — over a hundred credited designs — but the attribution is sometimes shared. In a windowless basement full of brilliant people, the line between lead designer and team product gets blurry. The methodology scores conservatively in those moments.

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The Fall of the Empire

SPI’s intellectual influence was enormous. Its finances were not.

By the late 1970s, double-digit inflation was eroding real-term income. The departure of marketing manager Howie Barasch left a gap in retail distribution that was never filled. The Capsule game line, intended as a low-cost entry point, actually lost money on every unit due to miscalculated distributor discounts. And the Dallas RPG — an attempt to tap the mainstream audience of a television soap opera — produced 80,000 copies that Simonsen later estimated were 79,999 too many.

By 1982, SPI was insolvent. The company negotiated a secured loan from TSR, publishers of Dungeons & Dragons, collateralized by SPI’s assets. Less than two weeks later, TSR called in the note. SPI couldn’t pay. TSR foreclosed.

The controversy wasn’t the foreclosure itself — it was TSR’s refusal to honor 30,000 outstanding magazine subscriptions. Those readers were the heart of the hobby. Losing them wasn’t a business decision. It was an amputation. Most of SPI’s design staff resigned in protest, eventually forming Victory Games under Avalon Hill’s umbrella. Dunnigan was forced out of the company he had built from a one-dollar magazine purchase.

The Golden Age ended in a basement, the same way it began.

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The Second Career

Dunnigan pivoted. He always had more than one gear.

His literary output accelerated. How to Make War (1982) became a landmark text for civilians and defense professionals alike — a handbook-style guide that explained not just what happened in modern warfare but how the machinery worked. Five editions and counting. The Dirty Little Secrets series, written with Nofi, specialized in correcting popular misconceptions about military history through short, punchy statistical briefs.

In 1999, he co-founded StrategyPage.com, applying his analytical method to the news cycle. His approach — treating current headlines as data points within a historical continuum — anticipated the analytical journalism model by a decade. The site categorizes military developments by discipline: surface forces, procurement, logistics, attrition. It reads like a Dunnigan game turned inside out. Instead of modeling a war from history, he models the present as history.

As of 2025, Dunnigan remains active. His recent commentary covers the attrition war in Ukraine, the potential of unmanned sea drones to deter naval invasions, and China’s strategic use of economic and information sabotage. The analytical voice is the same one that designed PanzerBlitz. The platform changed. The method never did.

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The Honest Assessment

Dunnigan’s draft profile arrived without proposed scores — just a thorough research dossier. The methodology scores him from evidence, not reputation.

Invention lands at 9. The methodology explicitly uses Dunnigan as its example for this level: PanzerBlitz created the tactical board wargame category. The ingredients existed separately — hex maps, combat results tables, military unit counters — but nobody had combined them at the vehicle and platoon scale in a commercial board game. Geomorphic maps, vehicle silhouettes, combined arms integration, user-generated scenario design — all new. The hobby recognized it immediately as a new format. Not a 10 because frames of reference existed. Operational and strategic wargames were already a genre. Miniatures gaming handled small units at tabletop scale. Dunnigan compressed and recombined brilliantly, but people had something to compare it to. That boundary is what separates category creation from category invention.

Architecture holds at 8. This is the dual test at work. The quality side is strong: PanzerBlitz had interconnected subsystems supporting thousands of hours of play. Panzergruppe Guderian’s “untried units” mechanic captured fog of war with real elegance. War in Europe remains one of the most ambitious manual simulations ever published. The propagation side is where the ceiling appears. Others adopted specific structural elements Dunnigan pioneered — geomorphic maps became industry standard, his CRT approaches were widely copied, the entire tactical hex-wargame genre exists because of PanzerBlitz. But designers borrowed elements rather than cloning whole systems. Nobody published “PanzerBlitz but in the Pacific” the way dozens of CCGs cloned Magic’s engine wholesale. The 9 vs 8 inflection asks: whole system as model, or borrowed elements? Elements. That is an 8.

Mastery scores 9. Again, the methodology names him explicitly at this level: over a hundred wargames and the Wargames Handbook. The craft arc from Jutland’s rough ambition to Panzergruppe Guderian’s precision is demonstrable. Others study his methods. The 10 vs 9 inflection asks whether the work is overwhelmingly solo-authored. It isn’t — SPI was a genuinely collaborative environment, and some key titles were co-designed. The body of work is vast, the refinement is clear, the influence is documented. But the attribution shares enough credit to keep this at 9.

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The Scoring Case

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The Hidden Pattern

Dunnigan treats war the way an accountant treats a balance sheet.

This is not a metaphor. He literally studied accounting before switching to history. The two disciplines merged in his design philosophy: every conflict is a ledger of attrition, supply, movement, and decision points. The romance gets stripped away. What remains is the system.

Most wargame designers start from narrative. They pick a battle because it’s dramatic — Gettysburg, Midway, Stalingrad — and build mechanics to recreate the drama. Dunnigan starts from data. He picks a conflict because it illustrates a systemic principle — logistics failure, intelligence asymmetry, doctrinal mismatch — and builds mechanics to test the principle. The drama, if it comes, emerges from the model. It isn’t designed in.

This is why the Wargames Handbook endures while most design textbooks don’t. It doesn’t teach you how to make exciting games. It teaches you how to build honest models. Excitement is a byproduct of transparency — when the player can see every assumption, every factor, every trade-off, the decisions carry weight because they’re real.

The accountant’s eye explains everything: why SPI ran on reader feedback cards processed through a minicomputer, why Dunnigan gravitated toward professional consulting where the model’s assumptions had to survive cross-examination, why his literary style is aggressively matter-of-fact. He isn’t interested in how war feels. He’s interested in how it works.

Porter built an engine. Gygax built a cathedral. Dunnigan built a factory — and the factory’s blueprints became more influential than most of the products that rolled off the line.

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What Remains

The tactical wargame genre. Geomorphic maps as industry vocabulary. The magazine-game business model. The Complete Wargames Handbook on military reading lists four decades after publication. The SPI/Dunnigan rapid-prototyping method still practiced by the field’s top designers. A bridge between commercial gaming and professional defense analysis that the Pentagon still walks across.

Dunnigan industrialized wargaming. He took a cottage hobby run by enthusiasts releasing one or two titles a year and turned it into a high-volume, data-driven, professionally staffed operation that produced hundreds of simulations across every era of human conflict. The factory closed. The methods survived.

If Gygax proved that games could create worlds, Dunnigan proved that games could model them. One built the cathedral of imagination. The other built the analytical engine that makes the cathedral’s architecture visible.

34 points. 1967. The factory that built the blueprints.

The wargaming hobby’s Golden Age lasted thirteen years in a Manhattan basement. The methodology it produced will outlast the century.

Total: 34 points. Year: 1967.

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34 points. 1967. The factory that built the blueprints.

The wargaming hobby’s Golden Age lasted thirteen years in a Manhattan basement. The methodology it produced will outlast the century.