been lurking, decided to register ;)

[NotQuiteANewbie]

Galactic Overlord by GEM Games was my first game, then I think a few games of CTF 2187 by Advanced Gaming Enterprises, a couple turns of Samurai Warlords (run by an Aussie GM), a few turns of The Bloody Blade by Damien Games, a few months of Supernova II by Rolling Thunder Games, and lastly a bit of Monster Island by Adventures By Mail about the end of the 1990s or maybe early 2000s? (There was one other game I don't remember the name or GM, but the game I think folded after about 2 turns or so. Was a fantasy wargame about an evil horde about to overrun the land, and players had to design & build castles to protect their villages.)

Digging through lists of PBMs, I am pretty sure the one fantasy game I could not remember before was "Jurien Range" by PBM Adventures. (I remember designing a hexagonal castle and starting to build a palisade wall around my village, then the game just stopped. Never got another turn result.)

"Samurai Warlords" was being run by Bill Paspaliaris if I remember right. (I remember I messed up inputting order codes on my 2nd turn and ended up looting all the temples instead of praying at them to improve what the conquered populace though of me.)

I also think I tried "Stars of the Dark Well" from Mindgate for maybe 3 turns or so.

I also even tried to design my own PBM at one point about 1995 or so, but I stopped work after realizing I would never be able to have time to do hand-moderation of more than a handful of players, and my programming skills were not up to the task of automating it - mainly I needed to know how to get a database to keep track of everything without inputting changes by hand (some kind of batch input). (Being limited to some BASIC, Visual BASIC, and a little bit of C that I could barely make work.) (Subsequently I learned some COBOL, DOS batch programming, HTML, and Java, but I really don't remember much of anything from lack of use for almost 15 years. These days can barely edit my own webpages I created years ago without looking up how. I ended up going into hardware repair instead of programming.)