You never forget the first time you see OGRE. I was around nine or ten years old, at the mall with my buddy David, and looking to spend some allowance money. It was at the Circus World toy store at Cumberland Mall in Marietta, Georgia and it was in a pile of those small-box “minigames” that companies like TSR and Metagaming used to publish back when being a gamer didn’t have anything to do with products churned out by mega-corporations like Microsoft or Sony and an awesome, compact board game could be had for five bucks. David was spending the night and we wanted some games to play so he picked up something about Vikings whose name and gameplay have been lost to time but I chose OGRE, a game designed by Steve Jackson long before his name became associated with endless MUNCHKIN spin-offs.

I remember looking at the cover depicting one of the most iconic and unforgettable images in all of gaming, a gargantuan robot tank with a distinctive sphere-topped tower, bristling with guns and thinking that it would be five dollars well spent. How could a pre-teen boy of the 1980s ever hope to pass up anything with something as awesome as an Ogre on the cover?

As if the pre-James Cameron image of mankind’s futuristic annihilation beneath the treads of a cybernetic killing machine weren’t enough to fuel my imagination, the game promised simple gameplay and lots of variety by way of customizable setups and scenarios. But the basic scenario was- and still is- one of the most intriguing that adventure gaming has to offer and somehow, this almost elementally threadbare wargame manages to capture an amazing sense of atmosphere, hopelessness, and a classic man-versus-technology subtext. It very nearly creates a sense of palpable fear and that by a single counter.

One player is charged with defending a command post on a desolate, nuclear missile-cratered wasteland with an assortment of tanks, infantry, artillery and highly mobile hovercraft called GEVs. The other player is the Ogre, attempting to crush the command post and escape off the map. The Ogre has a variety of weapons systems at its disposal to dispose of the humans and rather than targeting the Ogre itself, the human player has to disable either its individual weapons systems or its treads. But a mobile Ogre is still deadly, and a stationary one can still shoot. It might sound impossible for the defender to win, struggling against a veritable meat grinder to hold on to a worthless piece of land, but it isn’t. It is a completely asymmetrical yet finely balanced cat-and-mouse game when played between skilled players.

We played OGRE over and over again, eschewing even the NES for another round, trading off attacker and defender roles throughout the night. It’s a short game, and by the fourth or fifth game we were starting to experiment with different setups including a more evenly matched Ogre versus Ogre game. David’s game never got played that night. We were too busy fighting the Last War.

OGRE is one of those rare games that succeed largely by combining a solid theme with almost transparent rules. The combat is based on combining unit strengths to get odds for a single die roll against a defense value, terrain is minimal, and there are no rules for zones of control, lines of sight, or stacking that clutter up some wargames. There’s only one combat resolution table and after a few games you’ll have it memorized. Sure, it’s not the most realistic or detailed game by any means, even though it is far from abstract. It’s all about moving, positioning, and shooting and the strategy lies almost solely in those actions which means there is ample room for players to experiment, be creative, and modify the game with new scenarios or rules. It’s practically limitless in how you can play it and different players play it different ways.

I played OGRE off and on throughout the remainder of 1980s but eventually I lost my copy, ruing the fact that if I bought another copy that I’d have to cut the tiny little counters out again. A PC game, published by Origins was released in 1986 but all my computing at that time was done on the Apple IIe machines at school. There was an OGRE book and several expansions- GEV, which added more detailed terrain rules among a couple of extra additions and SHOCKWAVE which promised nukes and lasers in one peanut butter and chocolate package but I drifted away into other games, ignoring the big tank and the endless struggle of the Paneuropean forces with the Combine for years.

It wasn’t until the sixth edition of the game was published in 2000 by Steve Jackson Games that I caught up with it again at my beloved Sword of the Phoenix game shop. This edition, packaged with GEV in a VHS cassette box, was three times as much as I paid for it less than a decade ago- $15. I was with a different friend that time, this one called Kurt, and he picked up CARCASSONNE. That night, my game was the one that didn’t get played. He thought it looked boring compared to all the colorful wooden meeples and soft-hue artwork of his game.

So here it is 2009, and an offhand comment made by a fellow gamer over at Fortress: Ameritrash citing OGRE as a great simple game made me realize how much I missed even looking at the game, with its barren holocaust of a map and old-fashioned digital typefaces. I dug out that sixth edition copy, the survivor of almost ten years of game purges, and decided to play it again both face-to-face and via play by email using tools such as Cyberboard Gamebox and Vassal just to see if there was really something still there, if that feeling I had the first time David moved his Ogre those first three hexes toward my defensive line could be recaptured.

Ogre was first published in 1977, really kind of at the dawn of hobby gaming, and I wanted to see how a game from that period held up being rediscovered in 2009- particularly one that hasn’t remained in the sights of even some of the most devoted hobby gamers. It isn’t a “brand” game like DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS and its profile has been low over the past few years even though Steve Jackson Games produced an entire line of miniatures for it and has at least continued to support it over the years. It’s become somewhat obscure and only older gamers understand that if somebody says “Ogre” you get scared- and not of a green humanoid with a club.