Avalon Hill

History

Charles S. Roberts, a Marylander from a family of B&O Railroad men, wanted a war game ordinary people could buy. In 1952 he founded The Avalon Game Company and, in 1954, began selling Tactics by mail from his home on a hill in the Avalon neighborhood of Catonsville, outside Baltimore. It had a printed map, cardboard pieces, rules and a box: the first mass-market board Miniatures & Board Wargames. A naming dispute and the hilltop house produced a new name, Avalon Hill, on incorporation in 1958, the year it released Gettysburg, the first board wargame based on a real historical battle.

The company nearly died early. Debts piled up, a line of preschool games flopped, and at the end of 1963 Roberts planned to file for bankruptcy; instead his printers, Monarch Office Services and J. E. Smith, took over the firm. Under them Avalon Hill became the heart of a hobby. Afrika Korps, Blitzkrieg, Midway, PanzerBlitz and Squad Leader turned hex grids, zones of control and combat results tables into a shared language, and The General, launched in 1964, connected players across the country. It later published Diplomacy, Civilization and 1830, the ancestor of the "18xx" railway games, and in 1972 the survival game Outdoor Survival.

That quiet title became part of roleplaying history. The rules of Dungeons & Dragons (1974) told referees to use the Outdoor Survival board for wilderness adventures, alongside Chainmail for combat. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson came out of the Avalon Hill-era wargaming community, and it is often said that Gygax offered D&D to Avalon Hill, which did not understand it. Accounts differ on how formal the offer was, but the result is not in doubt: Gygax published it himself through TSR, Inc..

Avalon Hill came to roleplaying later and less successfully, with Powers and Perils (1983), Lords of Creation (1984), the James Bond 007 RPG through its Victory Games subsidiary, and a licensed third edition of Chaosium's RuneQuest (1984), which it manufactured and marketed while Chaosium designed. Its fantasy board games included Magic Realm (1979), Titan (1982) and Dune (1979). Computer games from its Microcomputer Games division began in 1980, but sold modestly. In the 1990s, with board game sales falling, owner Monarch Avalon put the company up for sale.

Hasbro bought Avalon Hill on August 4, 1998, for $6 million, and laid off the entire staff. The name became a Hasbro brand, placed under Wizards of the Coast in 2004 and moved to Hasbro Gaming in 2021. Under Hasbro it has published Betrayal at House on the Hill (2004), a new HeroQuest launched through crowdfunding in 2020, and the fifth edition of Talisman (2024), made under license from Games Workshop.

Notable work

Tactics, Gettysburg, Afrika Korps, PanzerBlitz, Squad Leader, Diplomacy, Civilization, Magic Realm, Titan, Outdoor Survival, The General, and, as a Hasbro brand, Betrayal at House on the Hill and the revived HeroQuest.

Legacy

Every roleplaying game has an Avalon Hill ancestor. The hobby wargame gave D&D its players, its conventions, its fanzines and its habit of reading rules closely, and an Avalon Hill board literally supplied the first D&D wilderness. The company's own ventures into roleplaying were modest, but without the community it built there would have been no audience for TSR, Inc.'s strange new game.