There’s a fly in my soup. I just sat down to write about how much I love Space Gamer as a magazine, and I open up the first issue we’re going to look at and right there in the first sentence of the second paragraph of the first story in the magazine, an editorial by publisher and Metagaming owner Howard Thompson, is the n-word. Used in metaphor to describe the plight of the wargaming fan within the larger tabletop hobby. Sorry, but fuck that. I may love Space Gamer but I really don’t like Howard Thompson now (given what I know about his falling out with Steve Jackson, I kind of thought he was a jerk, now I know for sure that he was).

Anyway. Aside of that, I love Space Gamer. At this point (July/August, 1978), it is basically a house organ for Metagaming. The big feature is an introduction to the latest microgame, Ice War, and there are two (!) articles with alternate rules for Melee (one for combat on horseback, one for more interesting fisticuffs). There is stuff for other publishers games, too – a rules hack for SPI’s War of the Rings wargame and some new weapons for Traveller. Taken together, I feel like I am looking at a completely different tabletop world. At least compared to the one I am familiar with through Dragon Magazine. It is a little bit weirder, a little bit more stripped down, a lot more wargame focused. Its interesting. Aside of the racism.

I love this cover art. So bright! So late 70s! So weird and, at the same time, oddly generic! I am pretty sure I had a coloring book in the 80s that was full of pictures like this. It also makes me think of stained glass design kits that were a big crafty thing when I was a kid. I have no idea who Scot Bayless, the artist, is, but I did find a fellow on the Google machine who specializes in glass art, so maybe the same guy? I’ve had worse hunches.