You may have heard me wax nostalgically about Avalon Hill's "house organ," The General. That magazine was a foundation of Avalon Hill's success, since it helped initiate people into the hobby and kept them engage. The series replay articles, for example, showed you how the game worked and what basic strategies one might employ, easing adoption of even the most complex game. They gave you a "See/Try/Buy" moment, as a customer, albeit in a surrogate fashion. And they were fun to read, often including hilarious smack-talk.
Other types of articles in The General were equally good. Designer notes, strategy articles, variants -- all great content. I wish this sort of journal still existed, in printed or electronic format. It kinda does, but the content is scattered all over the place, from the publisher's web sites to Boardgame Geek to Consimworld to blogs to the lost Crusader kingdom of Prester John. (OK, not the last one, but definitely the rest.) In the process, the collection of content around a game list coherence. When Avalon Hill published a new game, you expected to see an article by the designer and a series replay, at the very least. Both are very valuable kinds of content that largely don't exist today, or are very hard to track down.
So, imagine my delight in hearing that someone was digitizing The General and selling it on DVD. I make no recommendations about how to interpret their claims that the content is in the public domain or not. I'll just say that, if you buy these electronic version, or the old printed versions, you'll find great articles about games still played today, such as Titan, Third Reich, Magic Realm, and others.
The level of play in the Series Replay for new games always seemed rather low. I wondered if it was a sly ploy to get people to buy the game in order to play it right or just due to the newness and the all the required work to record moves and comments.
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