Yes Alan, after having read those Asylum articles, we are all very glad you decided to persue game design instead of trying to become a humor columnist.

Though your game articles and analysis were great!

To be honest I remember Alan's Asylum articles the best. Of course, I don't know if I would find them particularly funny today (guess I should drag some of those old Generals out of the basement!) but at the time I enjoyed them a lot.

Poignant memory here. . .this is a game that my Mom bought me as an adult. She had NO idea what it was about; only knew that I liked games. It still sits on my gaming shelf; unplayed, actually. . hey, Alan, wanna come over and demo?

I remember a game of HEXAGONY at the home of Bill Cleary and Cliff Willis shortly after it was released. There were six of us and one of the other players was Mick Uhl. We were all whiners back in those days, but Cliff was the best. We assigned seats randomly. When Cliff discovered he was going to be between Mick and me, he declared he had already lost the game!

Cliff was also the Archie Bunker of our bunch. He would invariably mangle words. My favorite was during one game when he gave one of his opponents a very serious ultimato.

Alan

I re-read one of the asylum colums in the General V 16- Magic Realm on the cover. It was just after a week of intense gaming and game buying. I read it aloud to my fiance and she freaked out. She was worried I would become "you" in that article.

Note to self: Don't read fiance Asylum Entries.

Thanks Andrew. My wife Janet loved your note to self.

Alan

She may reference that article at times moving forward. I'll need to watch myself.

WOW! ANOTHER OF MY LIFELONG MYSTERIES SOLVED!!!
I was a VERY young tot, fresh from having purchsed and played the life out of a flea market copy of Wooden Ships & Iron Men and noticed that the address on the catalog inside was 10 minutes away in Baltimore.

So I had my dad drive me there thinking I'd find the Willy Wonka Factory of games.

I found a house. On a residential street. Between two other row houses. With hesitation, my father knocked on the door and a long haired teenager in a black t-shirt (I want to say it was The Ramones but that might just be a fantasy) said, "yeah this is it. C'mon in."

The living room was a make-shift sales area, only without any product to actually sell. So I asked if I could look at some games and the teen said, "down the stairs".

The basement looked like my basement: games out on the coffee table. Games out on the corner tables. Parts of a game on top of the TV, and of course - seven games all mixed together in various spaces on the floor. It looked like a pocket tornado hit just before I arrived. In the adjoining basement room, two fat bearded men were playing a war game.

I said I wanted some particular game (I believe it was gunslinger). A guy said, "on the shelf behind you" and again I found shelf after shelf of opened, and unsorted game parts. Somewhere in the pile I found four copies of Gunslinger and pulled one out. As I turned around, I TRIPPED OVER AN UNFOLDED COT! It was like the kind they used in boy scouts only made of aluminum instead of the old wooden ones my grandfather had. As I cartwheeled over it, I tried to put it back where it was and one of the guys said, "don't worry about it. Its just junk."

We bought the game and left. And do this day, I had continued to ponder the meaning of an old boyscout cot in the basement of Willy Wonka's Game Factory. I figured maybe those two guys played games so long, that sometimes they had to take a nap.

I guess know I know the truth. A bit of a let-down, but nonetheless, I thank you for allowing to finally move on.

Somehow, knowing that the paragon of wargaming the world over was not some gigantic cinderblock factory in a business park, but was just a converted rowhome in an older part of Baltimore - just made it seem all the more special. Good times, good times. God how young we all were.

Yep Arcadian, the store was in the basement until AH vacated the Read St. office. The whole building was leaning significantly to the left and rear. All the windows and doors on on the left side and the back were at a 20-40 degree angle. If you dropped anything on the floor, it rolled to the back left corner. My last office was on the third floor where the lean was the worst. Sometimes just walking along the hall, I found myself tipping to the left. I'm not exaggerating.

Alan

I still remember the Asylum article regarding waiting for your newly ordered games to arrive in the mail. Great stuff.

Hey Alan, I once bumped into the designer of Hexagony (Bin'Fa) and asked him about Hexagony. He said Avalon Hill totally ruined the game he had. Can you confirm if any changes were made to the game?

Hexagony was one of the first games, if not the very first, that our group got when we got away from playing Dungeons and Dragons and moved into board games, about 20 years ago. The core of that group still gets together about once a month, and we still pull Hexagony out from time to time. Thanks, Alan.

Richard, my memory is that very few, if any, changes were made to the game play. Of course, the game was given a new look and new components. BIN' FA was Ken Hodkinson's "baby", which is often the case with designers who have only one game, particularly when they publish it themselves. There is a reason such endeavors are called vanity presses. Designers hate to see their baby changed in any way. I can remember feeling the same way about my first few games. But when the the baby is sold to a game publisher, it will always be changed in some way.

Alan

Even as a 12 year old gamer I would try to beat my Dad to the newest edition of the General in the mailbox just to read The Asylum. Although I've only recently gotten back into playing AH Wargames after a 10 year break, I still remember Alan's contributions to a great period in my life.