Question 2:
What can you share with Cigar Box Heroes about the early days of Johnny
Reb rules development with
John Hill?
During
the 1960s I did not play miniatures games. However, the military
board game industry emerged during the sixties and I was the first
one on my block to purchase Tactics
II,
designed by Charles Roberts and published in 1962 by the legendary
Avalon Hill Game Company. Tactics
II was the
first military board war game ever published. This game was too
theoretical and stark for my taste, but in quick succession AH
published Gettysburg,
Afrika
Korps,
D-Day
and Waterloo.
I played these games extensively (learned Waterloo
when on my Honeymoon in 1966).
In
college, my interest in Horse & Musket warfare was far greater
than my interest in studying for my classes. I read every book in
the Ball State University library
on the Napoleonic or French Revolutionary wars, and bought many
others besides. I hoped to someday design a Napoleonic miniatures
game that was heavy on tactics but still fun to play and challenging.
 |
| A Polaroid picture of a Johnny Reb campaign game in Dean's basement 20+ years ago. |
After
marrying, becoming the father of twin boys, landing a job as an
adjustor at State Farm Insurance Company, and graduating from
college–in that order–I became interested in trains and scale
model railroading. My problem was that there were no good hobby
shops in the area. Late in 1969, I heard about a hobby shop only
sixty miles away, in Lafayette, IN that was rumored to be a scale
modeler’s dream. I took off work and hurried over there, to find
that “The Scale Model Shop” was everything it was rumored to be.
The proprietors of that special place were John Hill and Norris
Darrell.
“The
Scale” was a terrific hobby shop where a “serious” scale
modeler could find about anything needed to build model railroads or
war game terrain. I visited the shop often. Initially, my
friendship with John and Norris was founded on mutual interest in
modeling Colorado Narrow Gauge railroads. But as the months rolled
by, it became apparent that we also harbored a mutual interest in war
games. Soon, we were talking more about military history and less
about trains. I learned that John owned his own board game company,
Conflict Games. Conflict Games publications included Verdun: The
Game of Attrition,
Kasserine
Pass,
Overlord
and Bar-Lev.
All were designed by John (Several of these games have recently been
reissued by other companies). Over the course of a year or so, war
gaming, modeling, and historical research replaced model railroading
as our primary mutual interest. However, our interest in very detailed model railroad scenery has been a major factor in our insistence on very realistic wargame miniatures boards. John has even taken this penchant for detailed wargame boards into his latest board and miniature game design - "Shiloh Dawn" for Pacific Rim Publishing.
 |
| A preview of the map from John Hill's latest project "Shiloh Dawn". |
Squad
Leader and
Johnny Reb
were invented almost simultaneously in John’s basement roughly
between the years 1971 and 1978. Both were developed and
play-tested under John’s leadership by a dedicated group of war
gamers who were also amateur historians. We even had one
professional historian in the group, Professor Gunther Rothenberg
(Gunther eventually wrote several well-received books on Napoleonic
warfare). Squad
Leader was
already under design when I joined John’s gaming group sometime in
1972. We played the earliest versions of the game on John’s
basement floor using Micro-Armor tanks and vehicles. Terrain was cardboard cutouts or chalked in. As
the design developed, unit counters representing infantry, heavy
weapons squads, and officers were introduced. The use of counters
to represent infantry formations made the battles seem more realistic
and interesting. An Allied player soon learned to fear the arrival
on the battlefield of a column of Micro-Armor SdKf 251s with Feldgrau
unit counters stacked on them.
 |
Another 20+ year old Polaroid picture of a Johnny Reb
scenario played in Dean's basement. |
Occasionally, we needed a
break from WWII play-testing, and as the Horse & Musket guy on
the team, I volunteered to bring my Napoleonic figure collection to
John’s basement and to host a game using my homegrown rules. By 1973, I had amassed respectable
forces of French and Prussian 25 mm figures manufactured by “Der
Kriegspieler”, and had hobbled together a half-assed set of Napoleonic miniature rules based
loosely on the Napoleonique
rules written by Jim Getz (Empire)
and Duke Seifried - "Uncle Duke". Just
like any war gamer past or present, I’m incapable of playing anyone
else’s rules without first modifying them to suit me. John’s the
same way, and so every time we played my game we made changes and
found problems until finally John decided that we could do better and
so John and I embarked on
the design of a horse & musket miniatures game. Thus the Johnny Reb
project was born. After some discussion, we decided to base our
rules on the American Civil War (ACW). We
decided on the ACW because we had access to tons of research
material, all in English, and we could also visit the battlefields.
Another reason is that it would be somewhat easier to design a game
based on our Civil War because the troops and tactics were more
generic. Unlike the Napoleonic Period, we would not have to struggle
with the complicated problems inherent to depicting “national
differences” in tactical doctrine, maneuverability, or temperament
of the many European belligerents.
 |
A picture of John Hill's "Battle of Resaca"
scenario from Historicon 1997. |
Both
Squad
Leader and
Johnny Reb
were considered at the time of their publication to represent major
advancements in recreational military game design. Squad
Leader was
published by Avalon
Hill in
1977, and quickly became the best-selling military board game in
history up to that time. For his achievement, in 1978 John Hill was awarded the "Charles Roberts Award" for "Best Tactical - Operational Game" at the Origins II convention. In 1980, the subscribers of Campaign Magazine selected "Squad Leader" as "the Best Game of All Time". Johnny Reb was finally published in 1983 by Adventure Games, and quickly gained great popularity among Civil War miniatures players and in 1984, John received the H.G. Well's award for Johnny Reb as "The Best Miniatures Rules of 1983".
 |
| Play testing for the Johnny Reb tournament at Origins 1986. |
If
you guys are still interested, in my next submission I’ll try to
describe some of the Johnny
Reb
mechanics that were considered innovative when the game was published
twenty-nine years ago.
