Guidon Games
| Private (defunct) | |
| Industry | wargaming publisher |
| Founded | Evansville, Indiana (1971) |
| Headquarters | Evansville, Indiana, and later in Belfast, Maine |
|
Key people
|
Don Lowry, Gary Gygax |
| Products | Chainmail, Fight in the Skies, Tractics |
Guidon Games produced board games and rulebooks for wargaming with miniatures, and in doing so influenced Tactical Studies Rules (later TSR, Inc.), the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons. The Guidon Games publishing imprint was the property of Lowrys Hobbies (later Lowry Enterprises), a mail-order business owned by Don and Julie Lowry. About a dozen titles were released under the imprint from 1971 to 1973.
By the late 1960s the miniature wargaming hobby had grown large enough that there was a demand for rulebooks dedicated to a single historical period. Don Featherstone of the UK produced booklets for eight different periods in 1966. A few years later the Wargames Research Group began producing rulesets with an emphasis on historical accuracy.
With this trend in mind Lowry conceived the Wargaming with Miniatures series for which he recruited rulebook authors from the ranks of the International Federation of Wargamers. Through the IFW Lowry met Gary Gygax, who served as series editor. Gygax began working for Guidon in 1970. Gygax and Jeff Perren's set of medieval miniatures rules from the Castle & Crusade Society's The Domesday Book brought Gygax to the attention of Guidon Games, who hired him to produce the "Wargaming with Miniatures" series of games. Gygax also co-authored the first title in the series, Chainmail, which became Guidon's best seller. The series game to include books by Lou Zocchi, Tom Wham, and Dave Arneson. Other notable titles in the series are Tractics, one of the first published games to make use of the 20-sided die, and Don't Give Up The Ship!, the first collaboration between Gygax and Arneson, the co-creators of Dungeons & Dragons.
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Wikipedia