12:47 AM
Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, there was a small gaming company in Texas that published a wide range of mostly SF and Fantasy games, called Metagaming. Metagaming Concepts published a variety of boxed games of various sizes, but the series that is indexed here focuses on a revolutionary concept the company came up with starting in 1979 with the publication of a little game named OGRE... namely "Microgames". These were small, easy to carry (all of them fit in your pocket) and never cost more than three dollars. I bought almost all of them back in the day, when most of them were already out of print, and I have for certain played almost all of them.
The production standards of micros were pretty thin. Strip cut counters you had to cut yourself. a small 11 by 17 map that folded four times. Four color separation was considered an expensive luxury. They'd be laughed at today. Still, there was a lot of game in these micros, though a lot of them were marginal as the company's fortunes declined.
This series has been published here in 8 articles throughout the blog, starting back last Fall. This post will be the master index if you need to navigate through the series. The index (below) will be at the bottom of every post.
Stand by for series 2, at some point in the next 2-3 weeks.
Now, there were several games in this series, but I'm breaking them into four categories:
1) The Fantasy and Science Fiction Series (outlined in Series 1)
2) Micro-Quests for the Fantasy Trip system, which also were numbered in the series. I won't be going into these in any kind of depth, because Ty Beard has done a superlative job of supporting the original Fantasy Trip system on this site: http://www.reese.org/tft/ Joe Hartley goes into the microquests (including box art) in some detail here: http://tft.brainiac.com/. To add any more to this would be repetitive and to be honest, I only played a few of them. I was more of a D&D fan.
3) The METAGAMING series was a series of much larger (not pocket sized) games in cardboard boxes and with diecut counters. They weren't micros and they cost about
4) The METAHISTORY series were a small series within the larger group of micros that concerned themselves solely with historical subjects. This will be Series 2, and it will be substantially shorter than 1.
References:
1) A particularly good GEEKLIST about Metagaming Micros. You can see where I broke out the history games from this.
2) Microgaming HQ Archives
3) Brian Train's LITTLE WARS
4) Another TFT page
5) The Metagaming Ludography, what I checked this list against.
6) Joe Scoleri's Microgame Museum, longterm source for images and important trivia regarding micros.
7) Marginalia has a rather nice restrospective essay on micros, and Metagaming in particular.
1 OGRE and Melee
2 WarpWar and Olympica
3 Starleader: Assault, Chitin:I and Dimension Demons
4 Rivets and Black Hole
5 G.E.V. and Holy War
6 Ice War, Annihilator/One World, and Hot Spot
7 Invasion of the Air Eaters and Artifact
8 Trailblazer, Helltank/Helltank Destroyer, and Lords of the Underearth
