“Ecosystem” From YAAH! Magazine #16

Armchair Dragoons PAO, 29 June 2026

It’s weird to be picking up a wargaming column that follows Dr. Peter Perla, one of the nicest people in wargaming and someone always quick with an encouraging word for his fellow wargamers. If you want your imposter syndrome to spike, take on the impossible task of following in a legend’s footsteps!

I promise to keep my introduction to two sentences: I’m Brant Guillory, editorial director at The Armchair Dragoons and host of the Mentioned in Dispatches podcast. In addition to my time in the Army, I’ve been a hobby gamer since the ‘70s, a writer and reviewer since the ‘90s, and I’ve designed games for hobby, academic, and national security audiences over the past 30 years.

This is a reprint of Brant’s inaugural column for YAAH! Magazine, which appeared in issue #16. Thanks to Nathan and the YAAH! Magazine team for allowing us to share it with you.

Today, however, I’d like to turn our attention to the hobby wargaming world and the larger ecosystem within which today’s wargamers exist.

Long-time grognards will wistfully recall what they refer to as the “golden age” of wargaming of the mid-1970s through the early 1980s (roughly when TSR bought SPI). With Avalon Hill (AH), Simulations Publications, Inc (SPI), and Game Designers’ Workshop (GDW) all churning out well-remembered games and magazines (providing reviews, scenarios, and even opponent-finding services), wargamers felt like they had a cornucopia of options for indulging in their passion. Multiple wargame conventions operated on a national scale, and clubs were common on college and high school campuses. It seems awkward to skip forward 35+ years, but this is less about “how did we get here” than it is about “where are we compared to that ‘golden age’ of long ago”…

In the 1980, we had 3 major publishers: AH, SPI, and GDW, and a handful of smaller ones, like Yaquinto or Simulations Canada. Today? We’ve got arguably 5-6 ‘major’ publishers, and a metric crap-ton of smaller ones,

including dozens shipping in from overseas (for context, when compiling our weekly #TuesdayNewsday column for Armchair Dragoons, I check over 75 publishers’ websites and that’s not close to all of them). In 1980 wargame companies were full-time enterprises with staff designers. Today the full-time staff (if any) are mainly operations, logistics, and editorial, with almost no “staff” designers on payroll anywhere.

There were once 4 main magazines that regularly discussed wargaming: The General, Strategy & Tactics (S&T), and Challenge, plus Dragon Magazine (early issues had Squad Leader scenarios!). Today? S&T is still chugging along, and joined not only by this magazine, but also Paper Wars, War Diary, World at War, C3i, and several different titles from Multi-Man Publishing.

Origins 1980 had over 4600 attendees, heavily focused on wargaming. GenCon 1980 was just over 4500, but already half of the scheduled events were for role-playing games in TSR’s portfolio. Today, Origins and GenCon are two of the three biggest game conventions in the US (Pax Unplugged – PaxU – is the other) and all well into the 5-figures of attendance. Wargaming is very small percentage of the events at PaxU and almost non-existent at GenCon but regaining steam at Origins. The “flagship” wargaming convention is arguably ConSimWorld Expo, which never clears 4 figures in attendance.

But what we’ve added in those 40-plus years since the “golden age” of wargaming, largely thanks to the internet, is incredibly impressive: weekly wargaming-focused talk shows that give the community regular watercooler social events, literally thousands of gamers sharing photos of their games in progress and discussing their playthroughs, and online gameplay that doesn’t just find you an opponent, but lets you asynchronously play multiple simultaneous games without putting stamps on letters.

We’ve had an increase in publishers, titles, and production quality. We’ve had an increase in magazines and other media. We have more ways to play, with more opponents, than ever before. Arguably, the only place we’ve gone “backwards” are national-level conventions, and yet even there, the number of wargaming events has probably remained remarkably consistent, with literally everything else exploding in popularity at those cons.

So where is our ecosystem today?

Do we think it’s healthy because of the massive increase in customer options? Or do we think it’s a problem that it’s so fragmented? Do we think it’s well-situated with the myriad ways that gamers can connect? Or does the reduced percentage of wargaming within the overall hobby games world portend a continued downward trend? More (part-time) designers vs fewer (full-time) staff designers? Where do you land on the overall health of the wargaming hobby?

I don’t have the answers, but more importantly, I want everyone else to think about those questions. Talk about them with your fellow wargamers, both on- and offline. There’s not necessarily a ‘right’ answer, but there may be different approaches to where wargaming can (or should) go next. Good ideas come from all kinds of places

Look for Brant’s columns to get republished here approximately 2 months after the magazine is released

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