CoA also supported the game with scenario and annex books and went on to publish a revised rule book, called Version 4.1, in 2001.īond and his collaborator, Chris Carlson, took back control of the Harpoon intellectual property from COA and established the Admiralty Trilogy Group (ATG) to publish Harpoon and other naval wargames. The games came with non-generic cardboard counters, but no maps, and it was recommended that the game be played on a large, flat surface This edition won the 1996 Origins Awards for Best Modern-Day Board Game. CoA published the fourth edition in 1996. GDW went out of business and Clash of Arms (CoA) took over the franchise. The box said: “Start Playing in 30 Minutes. This version was popular among more casual gamers. Called a simpler version of the original Harpoon it was designed for novice players. The website states that in 1990 GDW published Harpoon: The Captains Edition, a traditional board game with non-generic cardboard counters and an 18 x 21 hexagonal grid map depicting the North Atlantics Greenland, Iceland, United Kingdom gap. This version shifted from playing with miniatures to playing with generic cardboard counters. The franchise now moved to Game Designers Workshop (GDW) which put out the third edition in 1987. Sadly, soon after its release the publisher, Adventure Games, Inc., went out of business. Harpoon was also used as a source for the 1986 bestseller Red Storm Rising, co-authored by Bond and Clancy.Īccording to the Admiralty Trilogy website, Harpoons second edition appeared in 1983 with improved and expanded modeling, based on the naval and air battles of the Falklands War. Clancy and Bond started a correspondence about the game and the book and became fast friends. One commenter said the game was best played on paper, because unless you had a playing area the size of a football stadium, all the player did was change which way the miniatures pointed.Īccording to Bond in a 2013 interview, Harpoon was one of Tom Clancys sources for his bestselling 1984 novel, The Hunt for Red October. Sold without accompanying miniatures, it could be played with just pencil and graph paper. Wells Award for Best Miniatures Game of 1981. Once off active duty, Bond contacted Adventure Games, Inc to publish the game. Then he and his shipmates play-tested it for the next two years while assigned to the destroyer, USS McKean. NAVTAG only came in a classified version and took three computers to play, limiting its utility.Īccording to, Bond thought he could do better and decided to create an all-purpose air, surface, and submarine simulation accessible to the general public. Using unclassified sources, Bond developed the rules and did the various calculations for what would become Harpoon, then Bond wrote up the original game in a week.
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NAVTAG was the digitized successor to the manual pen and paper SEA control Tactical Analysis Game (SEATAG). Indeed, the game did not spring Athena-like from Larry Bonds head.Īccording to, the then twenty-four-year-old Naval Lieutenant Junior Grade Larry Bond, encountered the US Navys official computer wargame, NAVal TActical Game (NAVTAG) in 1976. But everything comes from something else and Harpoon was no exception. I even invested in an upgraded computer to play it.Īt that point, I had no idea that the marvelous game I spent literally days playing was based on a tabletop and miniatures game. The naval simulation received raved reviews and I, like many other military officers and others interested in modern naval warfare, rushed out to buy the game. The Personal Computer version of Harpoon was released for the DOS operating system in 1989 by Three-Sixty Pacific and it took the gaming world by (Red) Storm (Rising).
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