"Favorite Old School Game Designer?" Topic

Terry Wise
Bob Cordery, for breathing new life into Joseph Morschauser's ideas via his Wargaming Miscellany blog, reprint of Morschauser's book for the History of Wargaming Project, and his own Portable Wargame rulebooks.

Well I have met or played with most of the American ones.
Jim Arneson was a good client of mine at the Florida shows. Really big into Osprey. IMy first miniature set of rules were his Tricolor for Napoleonic and I think Rally Around the Flag for ACW but I may be wrong. Other of his rules have already been mentioned. Tricolor was anything but complicated. Bucket of dice mechanics. That is why in 1977 we were glad to see Bowden's Empire.
Larry Brom is a solid candidate. I first played his games in 1984. Great friend.
Hard not to mention the designer of Johnnie Reb. But I had been buying games from John Hill as Conflict games for a long rime.
Zoo Zocchi is a great friend and a designer though most know him for his dice and distributing. He did design and you can see examples in his 1970s and 1980s catalogs. His Star Trek combat game was easy. Granted the Battle of Britain was a complicated one.
There are more but these come to mind as old school designers.

I wouldn't regard Phil Barker as 'Old School'. That surely should be reserved for people like Donald Featherstone and Charles Grant.

While I find Phil's language absolute torture, he was most certainly modern, scientific, innovative and progressive.

I have never met him face to face, but in the pre-Internet age he was quite open to being phoned up about rules and army lists.

Absolute torture is hard to live with so WRG rules are no longer the centre of my wargaming universe, but I love Phil's originality and wit and feel hugely indebted to him.

Brom and Chadwick

DoctorPhalanx:

Quite right about Phil – in his later ie DBX period – as advanced a designer as the hobby has ever known. Very innovative but not just for the sake of innovation.

I've met him several times and played demo games with him and been on many of his playtest teams. Great mind but not interested in the details of conveying rule concepts to mediocre minds (like mine).

When I sat down to modernized DBX mechanics (and in the end revise) for Knights and Knaves I consciously tried to use his concepts but not his methods of conveying. Seems to have worked but what a project!

Thomas J. Thomas
Fame and Glory Games