The Ads of Dragon: Strategy & Tactics

By now, regular readers of this blog are no doubt tired of my constantly reminding everyone that I have never been much of a wargamer. Despite that, I've long had a fascination with wargames, given the number of roleplayers I knew in my formative years who were wargamers. So, despite not playing many wargames myself, I was always aware of them and the companies that produced them, particularly Avalon Hill, which was located in my hometown of Baltimore.

I also knew of SPI, which, by the early 1980s, was producing the vast majority of all wargames published in the world. When SPI went bankrupt in 1982, its assets -- but not its debts and liabilities -- were acquired by TSR. Being a subscriber to Dragon at the time, I read about this acquisition from TSR's point of view, which, of course, did not mention that among the debts TSR didn't acquire was honoring existing subscriptions to SPI's magazine, Strategy & Tactics, an advertisement for which appeared in issue #95 (March 1985):

TSR published S&T for 21 issues before selling it off to the British company World Wide Games (3W). As I understand it, the magazine was poorly received by wargamers during TSR's ownership, as were most of TSR's wargames, which was likely a disappointment to staff designers who saw the acquisition of SPI as an opportunity to expand the company's repertoire beyond RPGs. Alas, it was not to be.