Avalon Hill Games

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Avalon Hill was a game company that specialized in wargames and strategic board games. Their logo contained their initials "AH", and it was often referred to by this abbreviation. It also published the occasional miniature wargaming rules, role-playing game, and had a popular line of sports simulations. It is now a division of the game company Wizards of the Coast, which is itself a subsidiary of Hasbro. When Avalon Hill folded, much of their intellectual property did not go to Wizards of the Coast, which allowed the Canadian company Valley Games to reprint the AH title Titan in 2008.

The company was started in 1958 by Charles S. Roberts following the success of his wargame Tactics. With Tactics, Roberts created a new type of board game based on scenarios that simulated military forces, strategies, and tactics. This sort of game was relatively well known, as H. G. Wells had written a set of rules called Little Wars early in the 20th Century, but they had used miniature figures and modeled 3D-terrain, like that later found in model railroading, and the situations represented were small-scale skirmishes between handfuls of soldiers.

Avalon Hill pioneered many of the concepts of modern recreational wargaming. These include elements such as the use of a hexagonal grid (aka hexgrid) overlaid on a flat folding board, zones of control (ZOC), stacking of multiple units at a location, an odds-based combat results table (CRT), terrain effects on movement, troop strength, morale, and board games based upon historical events. Complex games could and did take days or even weeks, and AH set up a system for people to play games by mail.

Hasbro

After some costly legal missteps in 1997 and 1998, Monarch ended its direct participation in the games industry, disbanding Avalon Hill in the summer of 1998. Hasbro Games purchased the rights to the Avalon Hill titles and back inventory and the name "Avalon Hill" for $6 million, and published a select number of Avalon Hill games while several individual titles were licensed to interested publishers. The popular long-time game series Advanced Squad Leader was licensed to Multi-Man Publishing.

Hasbro has also released new titles under the Avalon Hill name, also adding the Avalon Hill name to older games such as Axis and Allies that were not originally made by Avalon Hill. The games published under Hasbro ownership have been targeted for a wider general audience, and are less hobbyist-oriented than had been published previously.

Victory Games

In 1982 Avalon Hill hired some of the design staff from Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI), which had just been bought by TSR, Inc, and formed them into a subsidiary company, Victory Games. SPI had generally specialized in wargames that were more complex and attempted to be more exacting simulations than what Avalon Hill published. It also published games more frequently than staid Avalon Hill, which stayed with its two-a-year schedule of releases for a long time, even after SPI published games monthly in its house magazine "Strategy & Tactics," as well as stand-alone games. When Victory Games released a line of SPI-style games, it met with critical and commercial acclaim. However, the staff members gradually departed Victory Games for other companies, and were not replaced with new hires. The remnants disbanded in 1989, though existing Victory Games designs were published under that imprint in subsequent years.

The GENERAL Magazine

Avalon Hill also had its own house organ which promoted sale and play of its games, The General Magazine, which was published regularly between 1964 and 1998. The magazine offered a wide array of features, including articles on both strategies of play and tactics for specific situations, historical analyses, semi-regular features devoted to individual games, columns on sports and computer games by AH, listings of vendors and opponents, answers to questions on game rules, ratings for both games and players, discount coupons for mail orders, and insider information on future AH projects.

The HEROES Magazine

In early 1984, on the occasion of the release of third edition RuneQuest, Avalon Hill included in all RuneQuest boxes a single advertising flyer (see image, right) announcing the launch of HEROES, its own role-playing magazine. HEROES ran for ten issues from 1984 to 1986[6] and had the main purpose to promote all four Avalon Hill's role-playing games: James Bond 007, Lords of Creation, Powers and Perils, and RuneQuest.

Location

Avalon Hill moved its corporate offices to 4517 Harford Road in Baltimore in the 1960s, while maintaining a second address on Read Street, where play-testing was conducted and inventory maintained. *