The miniature wargame play celebrated in the War Game Digest could reach only a limited audience because it required painstaking efforts from dedicated and artisanal adults. Avalon Hill’s board wargames, on the other hand, could reasonably aspire to reach the mass market. They built on the recognized tradition of juvenile board games, but with a complexity that attracted a more mature consumer — all without the expense and craftsmanship that miniatures entailed. Avalon Hill branded many of its wargames as famous American battles, with titles like Gettysburg or D-Day, which minimized the need for advertising or explanation. This introduced many thousands of young enthusiasts to the principles of wargaming. But once Avalon Hill opened a communication channel for their customers, something unexpected happened: a community that self-identified as gamers formed, and exhibited many characteristics that are familiar to us today.

It was Avalon Hill’s magazine The General that introduced the gaming community to itself. Like the War Game Digest, The General started small, with just seventy-two subscribers, though an intense promotion increased the tally to five hundred by the second issue, with steady gains following. The printed roster of subscribers in the first four issues of The General yields only three recognizably female names from a total well over six hundred: Mrs. E. H. Burford, Martha Finch, and then a co-subscription for Mr. and Mrs. James Lee Matthews. The initial audience for Avalon Hill’s games was overwhelming male and youthful, with an average age hovering around seventeen. Culturally, this was an era before the formation of what Dapkus called the “women’s libbers” groups in the late 1960s, a time most vividly depicted in popular culture today by the first few seasons of the television show Mad Men.

The character of the early gaming community surrounding The General is most readily demonstrated in the “Opponents Wanted” advertisements, classifieds that Avalon Hill ran free of charge for subscribers to help them participate in local or play-by-mail wargames. Mixed in with prosaic and earnest requests to locate nearby players were notices of a different character entirely. As this service printed text supplied by wargamers who hoped to both attract and intimidate rivals, it was a boisterous, boastful, and sometimes confrontational forum. An advertisement in the second issue of The General promises, “Will slaughter any opponents on any Avalon Hill game within reasonable distance of our home.” Another reads, “Have Army, will destroy you.” As many of Avalon Hill’s games featured actions in the Second World War involving Germany, some advertisers took on Nazi pseudonyms and personae — though in fairness, a submission from “Adolf Hitler, Jr.” could be found in the same column as one from “Gandalf.” It was in these “Opponents Wanted” blurbs that the community embraced the term “gamer” for itself: in only the third instance, there is a call for “Avalon Hill gamers,” and by the next we begin seeing constructions like, “many gamers have expressed a preference for the German side in the game Afrika Korps.”

IFW Monthly, January 1969

Since the “Opponents Wanted” forum printed virtually anything it received, soon it published disputes over prior wargames as well as advertisements for future ones. Bitter players wrote in impersonating their past opponents with admissions of deception or even cheating. A certain amount of restraint on the part of contributors, perhaps with the occasional editorial tweak from Avalon Hill, kept vulgarity out of the “Opponents Wanted” column, but in other respects its discourse clearly prefigures the trash-talking that precedes, accompanies, and follows online competitive games. It was in this crucible that the first identity of gamers was forged.

The lack of female representation was obvious to this gamer community at the time. A letter printed in the third issue of The General signed by Nancy E. Shearer begins by asking, “all your ‘Editors’ are boys. Why? What’s wrong with girls?” The remainder of this missive strikes a less than egalitarian tone. “Since they say all’s fair in love and war I believe the two are very similar and a game via the male, oops, mail-ways as to how to catch a rich male would be just dandy for us girls on the look.” She concludes by offering, “I would like to visit your plant in order to see for myself just how that empire of men exists in a world free of all the sweet, soft, warm, lovable, bright, ever understanding but all too often in the way, girls.” The General responds, “Our Editorial Offices are open 9 – 4:30, Nancy, baby.” In retrospect, one may well ask if this entire exchange was a fabrication, but it expresses an attitude towards women and games that was, in this context, uncontroversial.

Even Avalon Hill did not maintain a pretense that they had a female fan base — they saw no evidence to that effect. When one woman inadvertently received The General in 1965, she wrote back the following: “It was nice of you to include me on your mailing list. Unfortunately, being a girl, I have no great interest in battle games.” Thus, when a purported wargames club at Villanova University sent a notice to The General in 1969 claiming to have seventeen female members and one male, Avalon Hill could only incredulously reply, “We don’t believe there’re even 17 females in the entire United States playing our games.”

From The General, May 1970

Astonishingly, some young men nonetheless viewed the “Opponents Wanted” service of The General as a potential way to meet members of the opposite sex. In only the second instance of “Opponents Wanted,” we see a young man advertising: “Player wanted 16+, Hartford or Connecticut Area, I.Q. 120+, Female preferred.” A hopeful wargamer in New Jersey asks rhetorically, “What is more important than AH to any American Boy? Right! Girls!! Why not the best of two worlds? Any interested ‘Fem Fatales’ in Blitz, Bulge, AK…” as he lists some current wargaming titles. As late as 1970, we see an advertiser in Warwick, Rhode Island looking for information on “space games” but then asking, “Any girls out there? Will try to answer all letters.” Even men who were not seeking female companionship worried that advertising for an opponent might give the wrong impression: a twenty-seven-year-old in Norristown, Pennsylvania concludes his blurb with, “Girls also may answer, but I’m married and have a baby.”

As the originally-teenaged Avalon Hill gamers grew up and married, The General carried more references to wives. In 1969, James Crawford wrote to explain that his wife is a “surprisingly worthy opponent” even though “she had never played any wargames prior to our marriage six months ago.” Some were not so fortunate: Dave Slick complained two years later that his wife Cindy “is not intrigued at all by the prospects of wargaming” even though she had promised “that she would ‘learn’ at least three wargames ‘soon after’ our entrance into the blissful married state.” Others complained of various domestic pressures curtailing their gaming habit.

In the “Opponents Wanted” column of The General in the 1960s, there were however periodic signs of female engagement. The most important can be found in the September 1966 issue, in an advertisement for a club then called the Spartan Wargamers. It comes from Donna Powell, Vice President of the club, who advertises, “Adult Wargaming Club for Los Angeles! Face to Face action! Ages 17 up! Male or Female!” Other members of the Spartans extended similar invitations to women; two issues later we find Hans Kruger describing the group as “an adult club for the sole purpose of wargaming and that is composed of men and women.” Donna Powell should be counted among the pioneering female gamers; although her husband, Russell Powell, conceived and led the Spartans, a 1968 interview with her in The General makes it clear that they had played wargames together since 1964, and she strove to rescue the American wargaming hobby from its juvenile beginnings: “In short, may I say that my husband and I only wish to bring this hobby up to where it belongs. Equal to or above Masters Chess.” The inclusiveness of the Spartan wargaming club led to a smattering of visible female players: Carolyn Holmes tied for first place in the Spartan Western Conference 1972 Standings, and among the three winners of a naval miniature wargaming tournament at the Spartan East Coast Convention in 1973 was one woman, Patty Boyce.

Opponents Wanted excerpt, November 1966

Yet the presence of a handful of female gamers in the Spartans was not indicative of a broader transformation of the community. In the International Federation of Wargaming (IFW), a large club to which both the co-authors of Dungeons & Dragons belonged, even the slightest traces of female participation are difficult to find. One member wrote to a club newsletter in 1969, “Members of that delightful Opposite Sex have been known to participate in wargames, so how come an organization such as ours contains NO such members??” The final roster of almost six hundred IFW members, tallied in March of 1973, contains only one recognizably female name, that of Elizabeth A. Parnell.

By the end of the 1960s, Avalon Hill faced stiff competition from Jim Dunnigan’s wargames company Simulation Publication, Inc. (SPI), who published the widely-circulated magazine Strategy & Tactics. Dunnigan regularly sought feedback from his broad readership to tune the contents of his games and periodicals. It was not until 1971, however, that the feedback questionnaires in Strategy & Tactics began to inquire about gender. The first returns that summer (published in issue #28) indicated that 1% of those surveyed were female, though that number is perhaps inflated due to rounding. At the beginning of 1974, on the next iteration of the survey, Strategy & Tactics reported, “We asked how many female subscribers we have. The number is roughly one-half of 1%.” That article goes on to explain their survey methodology, which they believed reflected “over 10,000 different gamers,” a sum they credibly represented as the largest study group available to the industry.

Masthead of Gamers Guide, early 1974

That figure, that roughly one half of 1% of “gamers” were female, is borne out by other contemporary sources as well. The “Great Lakes Gamers Census” of January 1974, assembled by the Midwest Gaming Association, tabulates more than one thousand gamers in the Midwest. It contains five recognizably female names: Marie Cockrill, Anne Laumer, Denise Bonis, and then two couples: Mr. & Mrs. Linda Anderson, and Mr. and Mrs. Paul Pawlak. It was this overwhelmingly male community which was the target of contemporary periodicals branded for “gamers” like Gamers Guide. And it was this community of gamers which was the intended audience of Dungeons & Dragons.