S&T Magazine Library

Volume 1, No. 1.

Recently, I've been diving into the back issues of Strategy and Tactics (S&T) Magazine looking for the "comparative quantified units" features. More on the CQ's later but over at Strategy and Tactics Press I highly recommend the S&T Premium Membership.

The benefit of this membership is access to the extensive magazine back catalog. For those unfamiliar with S&T Magazine, it ranks up there with Avalon Hill as one of the hobby's vanguards.

S&T started as a fanzine discussing AH games and offering mods but evolved into a military history magazine accompanied by a folio game.

A good history of AH, S&T and the board game hobby can be found in Greg Costikyan's article A Farewell to Hexes (SPI Died for your Sins). This highly recommended article also discusses issues faced by the game publishing industry.

The back issues contain a wealth of information and I strongly agree with the following quote from Costikyan (who incidentally, was no fan of their games):

"The historical articles were of the highest quality, and quite unlike anything being published in the historical magazines of the period, since SPI, befitting its gaming orientation, tried to quantify almost everything, providing copious tables of comparative data on, for instance, the merits of World War II-era tanks. Other journals tended to be far more descriptive. As a result, S&T acquired a readership even among military history devotees who had no interest in the games."

It was those copious tables I remembered from my dad's old S&T magazines that prompted me to subscribe to the Premium Library.

I am biased as somewhere in those back issues I have four or five published articles but the real bias comes from S&T being a constant in my wargaming career.

Currently, all the back S&T issues up to #294 (SEP-OCT 2015) are available. The earliest issues are scans copied into a .pdf file, some with highlighting and notes. The later issues are all printed to .pdf (i.e. ability to search within the document for keywords, unlike the scanned versions) and are magazine quality.

Also included in the library are back copies of World at War and Modern War magazines and for the oldest of the old school, all the Moves Magazines (an in house organ equivalent to AH's General magazine). I spent the past couple of days digging into the Moves back copies and there is a ton of goodness in there I never appreciated as a kid.

Strategy and Tactics Magazine Variant for Avalon Hill's Battle of the Bulge Game

Screenshot from Strategy & Tactics' first magazine. The table below is from a variant of Avalon Hill's Battle of the Bulge game.  Even at the dawn of the hobby, folks were modding and striving for greater realism.

Of interest to this current series of posts are the factors given to the units:

• Each unit is the division (e.g. 106th Infantry Division).
• The unit is divided by regiments (i.e. the playing pieces). 
• Each playing piece is assigned a combat and movement factor (e.g. 293 VG Regiment 3-3).

The 18th VG Division's three regiments are rated  3-3 (3 combat / 3 movement factors).

The 62nd VG Division's three regiments are rated  3-3.

The Führerbegleitbrigade or Fuh. Es. Brigade rated 12-5.

The 106th Infantry Division three regiments are rated  5-4.

The 14th Armored Cavalry Regiment rated 6-6.

My guess is that the ill fated 442 and 443 Infantry Regiments have higher combat factors than the VG regiments that decimated them is due to difference in artillery support available.

I am not familiar enough with the battle to guess why some of the VG regiments are rated over twice as effective (the 26th VG Division's regiment rated 7-3) than the regiments from the 18th and 62nd, both of which destroyed the 106th. The 26th was unable to take Bastogne but they may have been better equipped or closer to full compliment of personnel.  Something I'll look out for. My best guess is that both the 18th and 62nd VG Divisions were green.  One was formed the year before from Luftwaffe and naval personnel and the other was rebuilt after being destroyed in Russia.

I found this when looking for another S&T article in which a game designer listed the different data points that make up the abstract combat factors.