Wes Crawford

My first memories of playing games with friends was at age 6 playing Monopoly. We never could figure out what the 10% tax was so we just paid the $200. Sort of started my life as a savvy businessman...Those were fun times when the neighborhood kids would get together and play board games and with my Marx army men (always using my rules), and, on a nice day, playing Army outside around our neighborhood in Blacksburg, VA (always using my rules). That year I also saw The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and my mind was blown. There was Ringo with his big nose like mine and cocky expression on his face beating his Ludwig drums while up on this monolithic riser and everyone (girls) was screaming! I wanted to be him when I grew up.

By second grade all I checked out of the school library were books on WW2, the American Revolutionary War, The War of 1812, The American Civil War, etc. until the librarian would not allow me to check out war books anymore. I was crushed for the two weeks that this ban lasted, but I did start enjoying the Freddie the Pig series of books, as well. In 5th grade we had a unit on WW2. My teacher knew absolutely nothing about this subject and she had me teach the class during History Period for four days in a row. The class hated me because I made them take so many notes. They probably still do.

I bought my share of Helen of Toy games from the back of comic books, most memorably, Tank Trap. I waited 6 months for it to arrive (I guess they had a P10,000 system they didn't tell us about) which felt like 6 years. Still, "A tank is a crawling, armored skinned, fire spitting, man eating monster that preys on any helpless enemy" just might be the strongest game tag line for 10-year-old boys ever. Over the next years I graduated up to the Milton Bradley series of American Heritage games- particularly Broadside and Battle-Cry. I played these games as often as I could find an opponent and became pretty good at them, although I sometimes wondered if a single Battle-Cry battle really could extend from Georgia to Ohio. Around this time my parents would drag me to the nearby big city of Roanoke to shop every Saturday and I hated it. What a waste of time, I thought. But then one day at age 11 I was looking through the basement toy section of a department store and I saw these board games unlike any others I had seen. They were from a company called Avalon Hill, whatever that was, and they had this alluring tag line that was something like, "Now YOU Fight..." or "YOU command...", like they really were talking to me!! And some boxes had real generals and an admiral on them, and one general even replied "Nuts" to the Germans, and that was so righteous and true because I had recently seen The Battle of the Bulge movie!! Probably because I liked the naval game, Broadside, so much, I chose Midway as my gateway to Avalon Hill. At first, I thought this was a variant of Battleship, but then I discovered it was Battleship on steroids (and I was on steroids, too, at the time due to my horrific asthma)! I was hooked!

I also got my first drumset, a Ludwig Standard kit with a black pearl wrap. It didn't have a hi-hat stand or a floor tom, but that was fine for the first month.

As the middle school years progressed, I accumulated Avalon Hill games and, once I heard about Strategy & Tactics magazine, I immediately subscribed, thinking the world was truly marvelous that a game with a magazine could magically appear in my mail every few months! In the meantime, I started designing games because I had always made-up games. It was natural to do so. In 6th grade I created "Yorktown" and it was awful. Next I created a card game called 12 'o Clock High (who cares about IPs?), and if ME-109 and FW-190 cards were drawn and had an "o' clock" not covered by the bomber's guns, the bomber was shot down. Then I bought a Ballantine book on the Allied invasion of Sicily in WW2 and designed a game on this topic using D-Day rules and it was actually fun and felt "realistic."

Tenth grade brought new adventures. I joined the high school Jazz Ensemble and started drum lessons and soon sucked less than I had before. We had a Rock band and played Grand Funk Railroad and Uriah Heap and Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin and... The Eagles (each band member got to choose songs). I found out that girls loved musicians, especially musicians that did not have to take apart and load-out a drumset after the gig. That year I started playing table tennis seriously and even played in tournaments with the VA Tech Table Tennis Club against rival schools during 12th grade. In 11th grade we had to do a major project on the Elizabethan Era, and I did NOT want to do some silly research paper, so I spent about ten times the necessary effort and time and created a game on The Invasion of the Spanish Armada, including about 20 pages of hand-written rules, The game worked well enough but the storms were merciless. The teacher had no idea what to make of this and I'm sure she never played it, so I guess she had no choice but to give me an "A." But my crowning achievement in 1974 was my design of my WW2 ETO game. I did tons of research on units (Army and Corps level) and aircraft production and the like that year. The board was SIX big pieces of poster board, and I hand-drew 3" hexes over the entire map. Each cardboard counter had a paper clip on it that could be slid across the top to account for step losses. And, I had Event cards that could surprise the other player with Strategic Bombing or an Atomic Bomb or something. The game lasted about 4 hours, and we always had fun playing it. I stowed it away for college and my dad accidentally cut it up “testing a pair of scissors” or something.

I pretty much gave up gaming and table tennis at VA Tech and delved ever deeper into music. I performed in every ensemble offered as well as at least one band at a time playing clubs and frat houses. I can attest that the only difference between the film, Animal House, and these gigs was that in the film the band did not get beer spilled all over their gear. I graduated Cum Laude in PSYC, mainly because my old drum teacher had this same degree, and I let myself get talked into beginning an MBA. I hated it. I had a Marketing class and had to do a major project, so I made a board game illustrating all the principles we covered in the book. I received an "A" for this, but the professor kept my game for six months before he would give it back to me. He never told me why.

I quit the MBA program and soon began performing with the fabulous singer/entertainer, Jane L. Powell for 11 years, 10 of it touring the US, Canada, and the Caribbean. We performed at resorts, clubs, festivals, on cruise ships, and on the NACA college circuit where we won Entertainer of the Year and Jazz Act of the Year in 1990.I played zero games.

I left the group in 1992 after I married and while working on cruise ships (working(?) only 2 hours/night for 2 nights/week!), and we had a daughter and moved to Maryland near Washington, DC. Since then, I have performed with numerous bands, taught drum lessons privately and at Goucher College (1997-2023), and created and worked with various musical summer camps. I occasionally toured for short stints around the US, Mexico, Bermuda, and Morocco. I created The Rap-Along Game, Rhythm Blox educational game, The Drumset Play-Along DVD, and A Rhythmic Murder Mystery DVD and live show, as well as the Strike Zone snare drum template and the Head Scratcher snare drum. If any of this is of interest, check out www.WesCrawford.com.

Then, around 2018, I discovered my Avalon Hill games in a plastic tub in the basement and they were in fine condition. I remembered how much I loved games, particularly designing them, and I decided to try out some game ideas using The Game Crafter to produce them. I thought it would be very satisfying to have decent-looking games of my own on a bookshelf. I first created Cold Warrior, an espionage card-game-with-a-mat about the Cold War with a little Bond thrown in (unsigned, but on The Game Crafter). Then, after watching the entire BBC series, MI5, I designed Terror Cell-Washington, DC (presently unsigned and outrageously expensive on The Game Crafter). It's sort of gritty but the art is not. Then the Pandemic hit and all my gigs dried up. Thank goodness for Facetime as I continued teaching online. Our grown daughter lived with us that first year and we played board games 3-4 nights per week! I'll always cherish those days! I had a lot of free time and began designing in earnest and I met Ryan Heilman through a Facebook gaming group. He started doing graphic work for my prototypes. I designed Yankee Scare Party- The 1864 Confederate Raid on St. Albans, Vermont because I had read about this event in a bookstore and was intrigued about this little-known ACW raid that netted $4 million (2024 equivalent) from robbing banks. This will be published by Compass Games. Then I thought of a Union raid that was also by about 20 raiders dressed as civilians that stole something of great value, attempted to burn structures, and were chased by railroad workers. And so I designed Engine Thieves- The 1862 Andrews Railroad Raid of The Great Locomotive Chase. This, too, will be published by Compass Games in early 2025. After that, Ryan and I decided to design a game together from his idea and we created The Pursuit of John Wilkes Booth, to be published by Blue Panther LLC during Fall of 2024. I am also finishing up another game for Compass that I would call a historical-fantasy game. I'll talk about this more in a later update.