Avalon Hill Ludography

• Introduction
• Avalon Hill Games
• Expansions and Role-playing Modules
• Victory Games
• Magazines

In 1958 game inventor Charles Roberts founded the Avalon Hill game company in Baltimore, Maryland. The purpose was to publish his own, at that time rather revolutionary, game designs. While he brought out several titles, by 1962 debts caught up with him and he was forced to deal with creditors. One of the biggest was his printer, Monarch Services, owned by the Dott family, who ended up buying the company and running it as Monarch Avalon for another 36 years. The new company would be run by Tom Shaw.

Before 1970, more than 80% of the games were designed either by Roberts or Shaw. This was the traditional game publisher model. Over time, companies like Simulations Publications (SPI) started by James F. Dunnigan and Redmond Simonsen in New York and Game Designers Workshop (GDW) by Marc Miller and Frank Chadwick in Illinois followed the same model. In its history of dozens of games, SPI never brought out any previously published designs and in fact only accepted a grand total of two outside designs in its entire history (A Mighty Fortress and Winter War). Perhaps feeling pressured on the complex games end of the market, AH was to make a sharp divide from this practice when in the 1970's they acquired the titles of 3M company (which had given up on games) and began a long period of re-publishing previously-released titles from other houses. In effect, the AH company became more like a book publisher than a traditional wargame producer. And many of these games were on the low complexity end of the scale. In these days both SPI and AH published magazines to support their products and there was considerable teasing over this in the SPI journals.

Somewhat ironically perhaps, a few years later it was SPI and not AH which folded up shop. AH took the opportunity to hire a number of the ex-SPI designers and published their games under the label "Victory Games". Many of these games were notable for taking on hot topics previously little treated such as Viet Nam, Central America, modern naval action and even sex. SPI also lived on in a few titles published by TSR of Wisconsin which took them over. In later years, management of AH was taken over by by Don Greenwood, whose name is credited as a developer on virtually every title of this period. Greenwood has written that toward the end of that run, the company had been only barely profitable for years. Only a few such as We the People were groundbreaking or particularly successful. 1997-98 saw serious and costly legal missteps and in the latter year owners Eric and Jack Dott sold the company to Hasbro for $6 million.

In some sense Avalon Hill has spawned a number of heirs. Besides the titles which Hasbro brings out under this label, there are also re-publications of old titles and in some cases further expansions by Multi-Man Publishing and Eurogames/Jeux Descartes. Some other titles originally intended for AH such as Paths of Glory and Galaxy: the Arena appear by GMT Games. In addition Don Greenwood continues to run Avaloncon, the annual games convention, now under the rubric World Boardgaming Championships, probably now of greater interest than ever. So fans of the AH line probably have no need to fear: these games will probably be with us for a long time.

Magazines

The Avalon Hill Game Company's history spanned four-decades and there is a great deal of information to reconstruct. Any errors or omissions only indicate that we do not have the proper data. Additions and corrections are most appreciated.

Thanks for the contributions of Daniel W. Farrow IV, Chris Fawcett, Stefan Hess, Richard Irving, Nishimura Hiroyuki, Kevin Maroney, Wendell Martin.
The original version of this page contributed by Rick Heli.

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