The Space Gamer is a close cousin of Different World and Dragon Magazine, I think. It started as a quarterly in 1975, when it was published by Metagaming Concepts (probably most notable for The Fantasy Trip RPG). When Steve Jackson left Metagaming to found Steve Jackson Games, he got the rights to The Space Gamer, converting it to a monthly publication in May 1980. SJG continued to publish the magazine until issue 76 in 1985, after which it passed into several other hands (and through several other numbering conventions). This is issue 37, from March 1981, picked at random from the handful I own, mostly on the basis of how much I enjoy seeing Cosmic Encounter on the cover.

Space Gamer feels more like a normal magazine to me than, say, Dragon. Partly this is the feeling of editorial independence. While Steve Jackson writes quite a bit in this issue, the only mention of Steve Jackson’s games is in a two page letter at the front. Everything else is about…everything else. It also has an actual feature – a sort of oral history of a struggling play-by-mail game. The second feature is more in line with the Dragon content-for-games style piece, though – a bit on adapting the alien from Alien into TTRPGs. There are reviews, columns on the process of game design, a rules variant for transporting Risk to Conan’s Hyboria.

It is a fun magazine that offers a similar look at the gaming scene of its moment, but from a slightly different angle than Dragon. Need to find some more of them! (Narrator: He did!)