Avalon Hill

Avalon Hill, now owned by Hasbro and operating as a division of Wizards of the Coast, was a tabletop game company specializing in Wargames and strategic board-games. They were not only responsible for pioneering many of the key concepts of modern tabletop Wargaming, such as the hex grid and zones of control, but were also responsible for publishing some of the most recognizable titles in the board game industry such as Civilization, Axis and Allies, Runequest, and Dune.

In 1958, Charles Roberts founded Avalon Hill in order to capitalize on the success of his game Tactics. Self-published in 1952, Tactics was particularly noteworthy because it was based on actual war tactics and scenarios. As such, Tactics is considered to be the first modern table-top war game. Shortly after the company was founded, it released Tactics II, the sequel to Roberts' original game. The game, which was an improvement on the original design, featured a series of concepts that have long since become ubiquitous in modern tabletop Wargames.

One might argue that many of these concepts have become pivotal mechanics in many other types of table-top games beyond the wargaming genre. Chief among these newly introduced mechanics was the Combat Results Table (CRT), a tool to determine in-game combat success or failure. Shortly after the release of Tactics II, Avalon Hill published Gettysburg, which is widely considered to be the first tabletop Wargame based upon an actual historical battle.

By the end of 1962, Avalon Hill had fallen on difficult economic times. Roberts was forced to sell the company to Monarch Printing, Avalon Hill's printer, as a way of paying back his debt to them. Upon the sale of Avalon Hill, Roberts left the company and founded Barnard, Roberts, and Co., a small press. Monarch Printing, who changed their name to Monarch Avalon after they acquired the company, continued to run Avalon Hill as a subsidiary for 36 years until its sale to Hasbro in 1998.

Throughout the 1970s, Avalon Hill continued to publish tabletop Wargames, including such noteworthy titles as Midway, Afrika Korps, The Battle of the Bulge, and Blitzkrieg. However, in addition to its tabletop Wargame products, Avalon Hill continued to publish tabletop games in other genres, a strategy pioneered by Charles Roberts before he was forced to sell the company to Monarch Printing. Among these games were Acquire, an economic game of acquisitions and mergers, and Twixt, an abstract strategy game, the rights to both of which had been acquired by Avalon Hill when they purchased the products from 3M's Bookshelf Game series.

During this period, Avalon not only published original titles, but also purchased the rights to republish games that had been previously published by smaller companies. Included in these republished games were Battleline Publications' Wooden Ships and Iron Men, ledko Games' The Russian Campaign and War at Sea, and Hartland Trefoil's Civilization. In response to the enormous popularity TSR was experiencing with Dungeons & Dragons, Avalon Hill also published several traditional pen and paper role-playing games (RPG), including Lords of Creation and Powers and Perils. Through a complicated agreement with the publisher Chaosium, Avalon Hill was about to secure the rights to release RuneCraft, an RPG that had established itself as the second most popular fantasy role-playing game after Dungeons & Dragons.

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