High School: The Flying Buffalo Club

After class, Mr. Nicholas ran an organization called "The Flying Buffalo Club". I didn’t know it at the time, but he borrowed the name from a play-by-mail gaming company. Anyway, the object of this club was to play war games. It met everyday, after class and it was great fun.

This club was one of the few that I joined while in high school. In fact, I was even fairly active, which was highly unusual for me at the time. I had this concept that school was for learning, and thus extra-curricular activities were not desirable.

The Flying Buffalo club was an exception because we actually used the club as a way to learn. In addition, I have a love of world history, fantasy and science fiction, which were the basic subjects of our group.

What did we do? Well, basically, we played games. You see, various gaming companies at the time produced board games which simulated periods of history or fantastic adventures (one of these later became popularized as Dungeons and Dragons).

The members of the Flying Buffalo Club in 1978, my senior year in high school. Both my sister and I were members of the club this year.

I already had a huge collection of board games, everything from military simulations (World War II) to recreations of science fiction books (Star Ship Troopers) to fantasy (Empire of the Petal Throne and War of the Ring). These games were a huge amount of fun to play for many reasons. First, of course, was the reading and interpretation of the rules. This was always important and often frustrating. Do you roll the dice twice or once? How to you determine who wins? How often are the moves? Who goes first? All of these are important questions answered by reading the rules.

Next was the playing of the game. Generally, the more people you could get involved the better, and most of our games were designed for anywhere from two to a dozen people. We tended to prefer the games which allowed more than two players, as that gave us all the ability to play together.

Mr. Nicolas was very clever, and I'm sure he created this club specifically to get some students more interested not just in history, but in working together, enjoying each others company and learning how to apply strategy and tactics at the same time. If this was indeed his goal, he was very successful.

The members of the Flying Buffalo club in my Junior year of high school (1977).

I learned a great deal from my days in the Flying Buffalo Club. I was able to confirm that I had a good understanding of strategy and tactics. In fact, my understanding of how to win a battle and a war seemed to be almost instinctive. Not that I won every time, but I always had a good understanding of how to make the battle work the way I wanted.

On top of that, I learned how to play games, and how to be a "good loser" as well as a "good winner". I also confirmed my love of history (especially the Roman era as well as World War II), fantasy and science fiction.