I enjoy playing board games, but I am not really a serious gamer in the modern sense of the word. Serious gamers have their own lore, a catalogue of titles ready in their brain and a community of like-minded folk. But when I was in college my roommate Vern turned me on to SPI war games. Prior to this, my experience with war games consists of Risk, Battleship, checkers, and chess. SPI war games were about five levels above Risk. SPI stands for Simulation Publications Inc. This company was in existence from 1969 to 1982. They produced a great variety of war games which usually consisted of a map (some of which were multiple pages) and chits that represented individual units. Some of the games were based on historical battles and so the chits represented real units that fought in that battle, for example, one chit might represent the second battalion of the 506 th regiment of the 101 st Airborne Division. Sometimes the chits represented even smaller units than that. There were dif...