Take a journey with us to an ancient age, just one step up from carving game rules on clay tablets. The year 1973 was at the very dawn of the independent wargame publishing companies. Typesetting was done with a manual typewriter, print-on-demand meant the photocopier at the library, counters were printed on paper (and drawn by hand), page layout was done with scissors and cellophane tape, and two guys in a garage could turn out a wargame magazine that won two Origins Awards. The point was creativity, new ideas, and imagination. Production values would have to come later.
JagdPanther Magazine was the brainchild of Stephen V. Cole, who later went on to design Star Fleet Battles. He created a magazine that, over the next three years, produced two dozen games, 15 issues, hundreds of variants, and dozens of game reviews. While the magazine steadily improved, this first issue was, clearly, a work that had only begun to make progress. This classic magazine has been out of print for decades and has been sold on eBay for over $100 a copy. Now, you can have a copy (and soon, the complete set) at a very reasonable price.
This is a PDF scan of a copy of the magazine from Steve Cole's personal archives. It includes cover art he created on an old-style drafting board, the squad-level WWII game MP44, a football game called Scrimmage IV, and Cowpens (a little tactical game from the American Revolution; this copy lacks the Cowpens map which has not yet been found in the archive but will be added when found). Also included is an article on mechanized combat, a variant for Borodino, and a review of Strategy 1.
At the time, Steve Cole's passion was the Avalon Hill game PanzerBlitz, and he launched a project he called PanzerBlitz Unlimited, which meant a lot of scenarios and new units for that game. This issue included units for the Korean War and a lot more WWII units (for Germany, Hungary, Romania, Norway, Finland, Poland, Italy, France, Britain, Holland, the USA, Japan, Belgium, and Russia). Because Steve Cole (against the advice of everyone) did this magazine on 14-inch paper, this scan breaks each of the 22 original pages into two modern 11-inch pages, plus the maps and countersheets.
Written by Stephen Cole
