Some days there are moments that make you stop and ask yourself how you ever got to this time and place. You stare at the clouds, unfocused, remembering, the past and wondering how you ever got this old. I had one of those days, recently, when I learned that my oldest friend had died some months ago and I had no idea of his passing. I only discovered it when a letter I had sent to him in late 2024 was returned, unopened, 18 months later. I was puzzled, but worried. Clearly, something had happened. I did an internet search and found his obituary. I was shaken and deeply saddened. A part of my own past was gone with him.

My old friend, Tom Blood, was living in Nova Scotia at the end of his life. He moved to Herring Cove, near Halifax, about the same time Susan and I moved from Toronto to the small Ontario town that’s been our home for more than 35 years. But Tom and I stayed in touch and were usually in contact at least weekly. We spoke regularly on the phone and we played computer games online almost every weekend. We spent many, many hours together in World of Warcraft, and later in World of Tanks, but we played other games, too (Borderlands 1-3, Delta Force, Sniper Elite, Ghost Recon, Serious Sam, Divinity Original Sin, Diablo, Dungeons & Dragons and a few more come to mind of the many we played in those decades). Weekend gaming, usually taking up a whole morning, was our regular ritual. Some weekends, we’d get Bill to join us in World of Tanks, but we could never get him into WoW.

Tom broke our contact during the pandemic. In 2022, we had a falling out over some minor political squabble — so minor I cannot recall the substance of it. It wasn’t uncommon for us, and we argued all the time over international issues, party politics, and politicians while we played online. We’d get steamed and take a few days or weeks off to cool down, then get back to playing again. But this time it was different. He seemed much angrier at me, perhaps at the world. He cut me off. Before we could heal the breach, he passed away.

During this hiatus, I continued to send him birthday and Xmas cards usually with a letter inside, but he never responded. I tried calling and emailing, but he ignored them and soon both were disconnected. Cards were returned unopened, simply saying ‘moved.’ Eventually I got in contact via Facebook with someone who lived in his Herring Cove apartment building, and who had helped him move into Halifax. I learned this new address and sent mail to him there. I even looked for him online in his favourite games, but he wasn’t there.

It was one of the letters I sent to him before Xmas in 2024 that came back. Letters and cards sent later throughout 2025 have not been returned. Yet. I like to believe he opened at least some of them and remembered we had been friends for such a long time. Maybe he also missed our weekend games. I’ll never know.

Sometime between his move into Halifax and his death, he again moved to Kentville, perhaps to be close to his family for his last days. I hadn’t know about that move because I had no way to contact him. The obituary lists children, step-children, and siblings. I never met any of them, although he often spoke of them, albeit with few details. I knew from our final discussions that his health was getting worse, and he was increasingly less mobile, but he never let on it was that serious. Perhaps I should have asked more; perhaps I missed the hints. But at our age, health is a lot more tenuous than it used to be. You get accustomed to the gripes and groans.

Gaming since the 1970s

More than fifty years ago, I first met Tom. It was in the mid-1970s. I was working at a game store in Toronto at the time: Mr. Gameways Ark, on Bloor Street, just west of Bay. It was in a ramshackle house, owned and run by a delightfully oddball couple, Peter Statner and Maggie Husband. I had taken the job in the fall after I folded my unsuccessful Baldwin Street bookstore. I was resigned to working again for others in a retail setting, but happy to find something as eccentric and interesting as a game store. Peter died last year, another passing I only learned about as I was looking up details for this article.

At the time, Mr. Gameways was the biggest and arguably best store of its kind in the city, although there were other competing games and toy stores. It was frequented by a wide and eclectic range of people, from professional chess players to parents looking for ways to amuse and entertain their children and jigsaw puzzle fanatics. The top floor was dedicated to chess and backgammon (I was an avid chess player in those days, too). I took over the running of the second floor where board games and puzzles were shelved. It was a chaotic place, often crammed with products and eager customers, but I had fun working there. I met a lot of people in my time there.

Behind the central desk were I sat and answered the phone, were the wargames; battle simulation board games from companies like SPI and Avalon Hill (expanding later to include games from GDW, Peter Jackson, and others). I sat at the central desk and got to know the wargame aficionados who came in to see what was new, inquire about deliveries, and simply talk about wargaming. Tom was one of those players. We got talking and discovered we both had an interest in history and games, but had few if any others to play with. And we had plenty of wargames in our closets. It was the ‘golden age;’ of wargaming; hundreds of titles were published, and every historical period covered.

It wasn’t long before we got together at his or my place to fight our cardboard battles, usually with food and beer. Later, a few others would join us or we’d join them. Tom and I played every week, sometimes several times a week, playing whatever was of interest at the moment. Tom and I also briefly challenged one another in an arcade game called Tank. But after a few dozens of quarters spent, it paled against the cardboard counters  and maps of games like Panzerblitz.

We both collected large libraries of wargames over the years, and we played as many of them as we possibly could. Once we joined with four members of the local wargaming club to play the large-scale game about Operation Market Garden. In the 1980s, we were often joined by my other friend, Bill, who was an aficionado of Napoleonic naval history, and quick to learn the often complex rules of these games. I remember the three of us playing SPI’s Battle of Nations, a wargame about Napoleon’s battle of Leipzig. Bill himself passed away a few years ago, another lost friend.

In the late 1970s or perhaps very early ’80s, Tom and I drove together to the USA (Detroit, perhaps, or maybe Ann Arbor; my recollection of the location is dim) to attend a wargame and fantasy game convention. We spent hours there watching game tournaments, visiting booths, talking to vendors and gamers, watching tournaments, buying games, and meeting the people who designed and published the games we loved. I recall speaking at length with Dave Arneson, co-creator of the popular Dungeons and Dragons who had by then split with his company and was on his own.

One of the people we met at that show was Redmond Simonsen, the graphic designer for and partner in Simulation Publication Inc. (SPI) games and magazines, and a legend in the wargaming community. We were both honoured and delighted to meet him (photo at the right, below); he was a star in the wargaming firmament for his maps and counter designs, as well as the layout of Strategy & Tactics (which included a wargame in every issue) and other SPI magazines, to which both Tom and I subscribed. We also subscribed to Avalon Hill’s magazine, The General, SPI’s MOVES (about games and gaming) and others. I still have a couple of those magazines in my basement, somewhere, along with a few wargames. Redmond passed away in 2005.

In the 1980s, I wrote game reviews for SPI’s MOVES magazine and became friends with Redmond. Susan and I would meet with him for dinner when we went to New York City for mini-vacations in the 1980s. Redmond and Tom were both guests at our Toronto wedding, in late 1984. Many of the games I reviewed for that wargame magazine were those I played with Tom. And in that game-intensive era, we even played some of the new ‘fantasy role-playing games’ like Dungeons and Dragons, sometimes with our mutual friend, Steve, who is still alive and in contact with me via social media, albeit thousands of kilometers away.

Gameways was so busy it needed to expand, so it moved into an old post office building on Yonge Street in 1974. I helped with the construction on that new site and the move, and I ran the game floor there for a few months. Tom came in often to see what was new and talk with me about what we’d play next. I left there to work in book publishing in mid-1975. Gameways itself closed a few years later, finishing business with a big bankruptcy sale in 1984. By then, the entire wargaming industry was shrinking. SPI has been sold to a competitor, TSR, in 1982, and although it continued to publish Strategy & Tactics (without honouring SPI’s lifetime subscription promise and we had to re-subscribe to get it), we didn’t feel the games or the quality was as good as before. *

By then I had moved on and worked in other businesses, including the Toronto Star and Canadian Press. Tom and I remained friends. He was a postal worker through all this time, working both as a letter carrier and later as a inside sorter on the night shift. Although that affected our schedule, we continued to pay both wargames and computer games together through the rest of the decade, although not as often as in the past. And we had both found a new gaming platform: computers.

In 1977, I bought a TRS-80 computer, my first PC. Tom and I played some of the earliest computer games on it together until he bought his own computer in the following year: an Apple 2. I remember watching Tom showing me Wizardry, a D&D-like game on his Apple. We alternated playing those computer games on his and my PC. I learned to program in BASIC and tinkered with the code of those games so we could play as two, not just solo. Later, I got an Atari 800 and we also played games on that, too. We would go on to get other computers, eventually both winding up with Windows-based PCs. I wrote game reviews of those computer games in MOVES magazine, too.

When we weren’t playing wargames (or those later computer games), Tom and I went to pubs to eat, play darts, drink beer, and, hopefully meet women. Mostly hoped. We did meet some, and sometimes even went on double dates. But there was more darts than dates. In the early 1980s, on my own, I met Susan and we quickly became inseparable. My pub and darts nights ended. Tom, still looking for a partner, and I continued to play games, sometimes with Bill, but even less often.

Distance interrupts

When Susan and I moved outside Toronto in 1990, Tom moved to Nova Scotia. Despite the distance, we continued to play games, but strictly online. We spent many weekend hours fighting digital opponents in dozens of PC games for the next three decades. Sometimes we’d play one game and switch to another, but usually we’d play one during our hours-long sessions and play it for weeks on end. We used a software app to connect us so we could talk to one another during our games. We’d discuss current events, politics, history, books, food, and more during those sessions.

Tom and I played World of Warcraft online for almost two decades, one of the few games that kept our interest for very long The other was World of Tanks). Because we had very different styles of play, we often argued about what to do or how to do it, but continued to play together. In WoW, Tom was methodical: he would pick up one quest and pursue it as quickly as possible. Sometimes he’d pick up a second or rarely a third, but only if they were in the same area and could be completed along with the first without any side trips. He’d almost always ignore any other sidequests or activities until he had completed the first one or two and had turned them in. Me, I’d accept every one I could find, filling my quest list, and head off to randomly complete whatever was handy or just was near. Tom would ignore things along the way and focus on completing the quest, while I would ramble, check out things, fight creatures, pick flowers… I sometimes drove him crazy that way.

He also played WoW intensely when we weren’t playing together, so he got to know the maps and the quests far better than I, who rarely played outside our time together. But it was also fun, crazy, intense, and we laughed a lot while playing.

Tom would spend real money in games to buy items (microtransactions) like weapons, armour, ammunition, mounts, whatever he felt would improve his characters and his game. I seldom did, so he was usually better outfitted and kitted compared to me whenever we played. He was more dedicated to his gaming that way. I used to send him boxes of Barry’s tea and other goodies on his birthday and for Xmas, sometimes in between. Often I’d send him a book or two as well. Tom would respond by sending me paid subscriptions to World of Warcraft for a few more months, or special bonus items from World of Tanks. I even sent him my MSI gaming laptop when he was having problems with his computer. I still don’t know if he ever used it. I hope he got some use from it.

In 2004, shortly after he broke up with his then-current partner, Tom drove from Nova Scotia to our home in Ontario to spend a few days with us (photo above, taken on top of Blue Mountain on a day we showed him around the area). It was the last time we met in person. Twenty-two years ago. But we stayed in contact and played games online for almost all of the remaining time. Almost. And there’s the rub.

Friendship isn’t always easy. Tom and I had rough patches, disagreements, arguments about politics. But I always thought of him as a friend and we usually had more fun than arguments. I wish there had been some way we could have rebuilt our fractured friendship before he died. Maybe played a last game, or even just chatted about old times. But it didn’t happen and I regret not making more of an effort to contact him.

Over the many years we’d known one another, he and I had argued over politics and events many, many times, and yet we always managed to patch it up and get back to the joy of gaming together. Somehow, that opportunity never came this time.

Bill and Tom, my two gaming partners and closest friends, are both gone. I remain to remember their company and the fun we had together. Maybe one day I’ll dig out one of the wargames we had played together and set it up, and drink a glass of wine in remembrance of them.

Notes:

* Coincidentally, towards the end of its business life, Gameways opened stores (franchises, I assume) in other locations, including in Kitchener and Collingwood. They ran an ad for their stores and the game, Trivial Pursuit — the hottest board game at the time — in the Globe & Mail in 1982.

That Collingwood location (2 Hurontario Street) was a car dealership in the 1970s and perhaps ’80s, but was torn down to become part of the Loblaws store when it rebuilt an expanded store that now stretches to the sidewalk’s edge. I don’t know when Gameways opened or closed here, or who ran it. It was gone by the time we moved to Collingwood, in 1990 and I have never encountered any one who even knows about wargames, let alone actual players since we arrived.

I didn’t learn about that store until this week when I was looking for updates on Mr. Gameways. I think Tom would have found it amusing that I seemed to be following Gameways from place to place.

On another note, before we moved out of Toronto, I sold or gave away most of my wargames at a final yard sale as we downsized to reduce what we needed to take with us. I still have a few of them, though, just for the nostalgia. Most haven’t seen daylight for a few years, but I am still tempted to take out out and set it up. Of course, having cats makes it difficult to leave it set up.

In the early 2000s, I even purchased a copy of the remade Napoleon’s Last Battles Quad game to play with Tom when he visited (we set up one of the four battles, but didn’t play it) and then did the same later to play with our mutual friend Bill when he came up for a visit. Bill and I played a few turns once, but we didn’t finish that game, either. In the distant past, Bill, Tom and I played it together, the full four-game Waterloo campaign, individually playing the Anglo-Allies, Prussia, and France sides. I had hoped to rekindle some of the joy we all had from playing it years ago. But it seems the moment for board  wargames had passed.

Since then, it has sat on a shelf in a closet, gathering dust in the back with the other wargame boxes, a reminder to me that we all once played and enjoyed these games.

Words: 3,092