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SPQR is a board wargame designed by Richard Berg and Mark Herman, and released in 1992 by GMT Games, as part of the Great Battles of History (GBoH) series of games on ancient warfare. SPQR deals with battles fought by the Roman Republic, and is designed to showcase the strengths and weaknesses of the Roman manipular legion.
There are two editions of the game, the second having changes in some rules.
The game includes five historical scenarios, Cannae, Zama, Cynoscephalae, Beneventum and Bagradas Plains, plus a fantasy scenario pitting Rome against Alexander the Great.
The game maps are covered with a hexagonal grid, each hex representing 70 yards of distance. Each turn represents about 15–20 minutes, although the rules are designed assuming a loose time scale. Each counter represents 300 to 1000 fighting troops, depending on size and type. Since little is known about the terrain, numbers of men or types of units engaged, methods of combat, leaders and so on, these games, despite their high level of detail, remain essentially speculative in nature.
A number of expansions were released for SPQR:
SPQR won the 1992 Charles S. Roberts Award for Best Pre-World War II Boardgame, and Best Wargame Graphics for the map by Mark Simonitch; and an Origins Award for Best Pre-20th Century Boardgame of 1992. [1]
Ambush! is a man-to-man wargame developed by Avalon Hill. It was released under Avalon's Victory Games label and was developed by Eric Lee Smith and John Butterfield. It has been out of print since Avalon Hill was disbanded in 1998.
Battle for Armageddon is a strategic boardgame produced by Games Workshop. Unlike the many Games Workshop games that use miniatures, this is a more traditional counter and board game.
Sky Galleons of Mars is a board wargame designed by Frank Chadwick, Marc W. Miller and Loren Wiseman, published in 1988 by Game Designers' Workshop. It is set in an alternate Victorian Era where the major nations of Earth are extending their colonial interests on Mars and Venus. The discovery of Liftwood, a Martian plant endowed with anti-gravity powers, allows the deployment of aerial fleets in the skies of the Red Planet.
Fire in the East is a monster board wargame published in 1984 by Game Designers' Workshop (GDW) that simulates Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
The Charles S. Roberts Awards is an annual award for excellence in manual, tabletop games, with a focus on "conflict simulations", which includes simulations of non-military as well as military conflicts, as well as simulations of related historical topics. From its founding in 1975 through 2021, the award was almost exclusively focused on historical wargaming, changing to a broader "conflict simulations" in award year 2022.
Guadalcanal is a board wargame published by Avalon Hill as part of the Smithsonian American History Series. The game simulates World War II naval battles near the Solomon Islands and is primarily designed for two players. It uses the same game design as the Smithsonian edition of Midway.
Richard Harvey Berg was a prolific American wargame designer. He was inducted into the Charles Roberts Awards Hall of Fame in 1987.
We the People is a board wargame about the American Revolution, published by Avalon Hill in 1993 and designed by Mark Herman. We the People was the first wargame to use cards as the primary way to control the pace and tempo of play, with a strong element of fog of war through the hidden card information. This started a new genre of wargames that have emphasized competitive play and a strong historical narrative.
Twilight Struggle: The Cold War, 1945–1989 is a board game for two players, published by GMT Games in 2005. Players are the United States and Soviet Union contesting each other's influence on the world map by using cards that correspond to historical events. The first game designed by Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews, they intended it to be a quick-playing alternative to more complex card-driven wargames.
Commands & Colors: Ancients is a board wargame designed by Richard Borg, Pat Kurivial, and Roy Grider, and published by GMT Games in 2006. It is based on Borg's Commands & Colors system using some elements similar to his other games such as Commands & Colours: Napoleonics, The Great War, Memoir '44 and Battle Cry designed to simulate the "fog of war" and uncertainty encountered on real battlefields.
Mark Simonitch is an American wargame designer and graphic artist. His game designs include Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage and Ardennes '44, and he has made maps for Wilderness War and Empire of the Sun among others. He has worked at Avalon Hill and GMT Games. He was inducted into the Charles Roberts Awards Hall of Fame in 2002.
Napoleon's Last Battles is a board wargame published by Simulations Publications in 1976 that simulates the last four battles fought by Napoleon. It was one of SPI's most popular games, and also received many positive reviews.
West of Alamein is a board wargame published by Avalon Hill in 1988 that simulates combat in North Africa during World War II.
Team Yankee, subtitled "A Game of World War III", is a board wargame published by Game Designers' Workshop (GDW) in 1987 that is based on the book of the same name by Harold Coyle.
MBT is a board wargame published by Avalon Hill in 1989 that simulates hypothetical World War Three tank combat between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in Western Europe. A second edition was published by GMT Games in 2016.
EastFront, subtitled "The War in Russia: 1941–45", is a board wargame published by Columbia Games in 1991 that is simulation of the conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II.
The Battle of Raphia, 217 B.C. is a board wargame published by Game Designers' Workshop (GDW) in 1977 that simulates the Battle of Raphia during the Syrian Wars. The game was the first in GDW's "Series 120", which featured shorter and less complex games containing only 120 counters that supposedly could be played in 120 minutes.
The Great War in the East, subtitled "Four World War I Battles", is a collection of four board wargames published by Simulations Publications Inc. (SPI) in 1978 that simulates four battles of World War I on the Eastern Front and the Italian/Austrian front.
Mark Herman is an American game designer known for his contributions to wargames and historical strategy games. With a career spanning more than five decades, Herman is regarded as a pioneer in the genre, particularly for his innovations in card-driven games (CDGs), which blend narrative and strategy through card-based mechanics.