The 80’s
Another good list – enjoyed it while I’m not going out to visit family. There are bunch of games I like that came out during the 80s, now we are talking.
- Fighting Sail: Sea Combat in the Age of Canvas and Shot 1775-1815 (1981) – An SPI magazine game from Joseph Balkoski. Had a nice quasi simultaneous movement method and well captures small scale ship actions. The nearest I’ve seen to it since then is the Flying Colors system.
- A House Divided – (1981) A simple but not simplistic take at the strategic level for the Civil War. I liked the way it handled movement via a die roll. Interestingly it didn’t consider the impact of leaders.
- RAF – (1986) So much fun to manage the British response to the Luftwaffe attacks I almost wore the cards out on this one.
- B-17 – (1983) Another solitaire game that I had a great time playing. Feeling good on a milk run in France, moaning about being sent deep into Germany. Glad see that it was on Judd’s list and Hall of Famed by Bart.
- The Civil War – (1983) Eric Lee Smith did a great job on this game. I love the use action points that have to be allocated across different theaters, the use of a dice roll to control the length of the turn. How leaders could get worse as they were promoted (hello John Bell Hood). It did need some help on leader promotion and the ability to sideline poor leaders. Even with that it is still my gold standard on strategic Civil War games
Honorable mentions:
Britannia – (1983) It may be more of a Civilization style game than a straight up wargame, I like how new groups coming ashore turn things around.
In Their Quiet Fields/Thunder at the Crossroads (1988) – The Civil War Brigade series is my favorite Civil War battle game. However, it took it until the 2nd version of the rules for the system to come into its own so I consider it more of a 90’s series than 80s.
By the way – to get my list I went to BGG and did an advanced search for games I rated and published between 1980 and 1989.
put together
I also saw several non-wargames for the 80’s I liked a top 5 in fact.
- 1830
- Civilization
- Can’t Stop
- EmpireBuilder
- Liftoff