Gnt Spdr!

So you and your party (consisting of Hero, Other Hero, Thief, Other Thief, Wizard, and Other Wizard) are exploring a dripping cave when suddenly someone shouts "Run! It's a Gnt Spdr!"

This is a blow-up of the counters for the old SPI game Deathmaze, which actually wasn't bad as long as you didn't expect too much from it. It could only be played solitaire, though it wasn't uncommon for one's D&D hearties to play it en masse while waiting for the rest of one's D&D hearties, or for the pizza delivery guy. I thought it was a lot more fun than Magic Realm, though I took a lot of grief from snooty Magic Realm geeks for that belief.

I spent a lot of time and money on wargames, starting around 1975 with games like Starforce, Starsoldier, Tobruk, Panzerblitz and Dungeons & Dragons. By the end of the 1980s I was pretty much out of wargaming, partially because my interest in such games had waned, and partially because the games themselves had changed over time; I was not then a big fan of what came to be called the "Euro-Game", though today I am more tolerant and open-minded.

But anyway, I still have most of my old games. I sold a few at a garage sale, and I wish I hadn't. A few were destroyed in action - my old Battle of Britain game, the one with the round counters, dried out and fell apart like a third-rate mummy, and the vital book of paragraphs for Voyage of the Pandora accidentally got used as a blotter for a gallon can of varnish and had to be thrown away with the can of varnish. Some I just lost. Gladiator, for example, simply vanished into the mists of time, but I have a photograph of me and some of my friends playing the game and prominent on the table is a large bottle of Cutty Sark scotch and several tumblers of same. This may explain why I can't remember where the game went (my flesh crawls and I think Gawd, it wasn't even good scotch!).

Going through my old game collection is potently nostalgic, but I try not to do it very often. Every time I do, I find myself drifting over to eBay to try to replace the games I sold at that yard sale so many years ago, and I really don't need to do that. Really I don't. I need another Car Wars supplement like I need a hole in my head.