Past IGA Members

Greg Schloesser (IGA President from 1999 - 2020)

Greg Schloesser is the founder of the IGA and both the Westbank Gamers and the East Tennessee Gamers. He is also a prolific reviewer of games and a regular contributor to numerous gaming publications and websites, including Counter, Knucklebones, Boardgame News, Boardgame Geek and many others.

Greg has been a gaming enthusiast his entire life, growing up in our hobby mainly on the war game side. His foray onto the internet exposed him to the wonderful world of German and European games and now nearly all of his gaming time is devoted to this area of our hobby. He travels to several gaming conventions each year and is the co-founder of Gulf Games, a regional gaming get-together held in the Southern USA.

Greg was born in 1961 and has lived his entire life in New Orleans before moving to East Tennessee in 2005. He is married and has one daughter and is proud of the fact that they are now both avid gamers!

Andreas Keirat

Doug Adams

Erwin Broens

Erwin was born in 1961. He finished law school at the Utrecht University in 1984 (business law, economics and European law). He has worked for the Dutch tax authorities since 1986. In 1979 he stumbled upon a section with American wargames in the academic bookstore. Erwin started playing these games, became a member of the national gaming club Ducosim, visited his first Spiel in 1989, and fell in love with German games. In the early ‘90s he joined the Ducosim board as their convention organizer, helping organize the first Spellenspektakel shows in Eindhoven (the Dutch ‘mini-Essen’). He also started reviewing games in the Ducosim games magazine. In December 1995 he launched a website on unplugged games in the Dutch language. The current version of this website is www.bordspeler.nl. Erwin is a founding member of the Nederlandse Spellenprijs.

François Haffner

Since childhood, François Haffner played a lot of games with his brother, including Monopoly, Clue, Satarallye, Mille Bornes, and many others. He became a teacher in Grenoble for a few years. On this occasion, he discovered games such as Tangram, Pentominoes and connection games.At 25, he changed course and opened a board game shop. His first delving into "modern" games date from this period. He discovered Twixt, Acquire, Hare and Tortoise, Alaska, Diplomacy, Civilisation and others.

At 30, François moved to Lyon and became a computer specialist. He learned Go and quickly realized he would remain a poor player. He turned to Bridge, which occupied his leisure for many years. He is an official referee of the Bridge French Federation.

Around 40, he returned to his first love: playing board games. He continuously replayed the 20 games and ultimately decided to expand his collection. In 1998, a strange idea crossed his mind: create a website where he would review his fifty games. JeuxSoc.fr became a major website in French about boardgames.

Francois' collection continued to grow, and today has reached more than 7000 different games of all kinds.

Today, François works as a facilitator and adviser on board games, and is the author of Dalapapa and Maka Bana. In 2014 he and his wife Chantal opened a holiday accommodation for up to 15 people (L'Escale à jeux) in Burgundy (France), where he makes all of his games available day and night for vacationers who come to stay.

Frank Schulte-Kulkmann

Ferdinand de Cassan

Han Heidema

John D. Burtt

John D. Burtt is the current editor of Paper Wars magazine. The 55-year old father of four (and one grandchild!) is a former U.S. Marine sergeant and a Vietnam veteran. He holds advanced degrees in nuclear engineering (his day job) and military history.He's been active in board wargaming since accidentally finding Avalon Hill's Midway game back in the mid 1970's. Over the years, he's written game reviews for Campaign Magazine, Wargamer, Fire & Movement and Berg's Review of Games. He's also contributed military history articles for Strategy & Tactics, Command and the Wargamer. He's designed two games - 3W's Battle Cry (man to man scenarios in the Pacific) and S&T's Nicaragua (jointly with S&T's current editor Joe Miranda) He has been president and editor for the Avalon Hill Intercontinental Kriegspiel Society, edited Pacific Rim's magazine CounterAttack, and written chapters for Greenhill's Book's four alternate history books, Rising Sun Victorious, Third Reich Victorious, Cold War Hot, and Dixie Victorious. Prior to joining Paper Wars, he directed the Charles S. Roberts Awards each year and is currently the Awards chairman for the Strategic Gaming Society.

Knut Michael Wolf

Knut-Michael Wolf is widely recognized in Germany and throughout the world as an expert on games. He is probably best known to gamers for his KMWs Spielpl@tz, which later became part of Spielbox magazine.

Folks who have been around before the internet became the way of communicating will also be familiar with Die Pöppel-Revue, Wolf's Play-by-Mail magazine.

He has also helped develop over one hundred games, and has even designed a few of his own. Several Spiel des Jahres winners have been directly influenced by his contributions, including Dampfross and Cafe International.

Mik Svellov

Mik Svellov provided outstanding information about the German game scene in general, and the Essen Spiel Fair and Nürnberg Toy Fair in particular, with his Brett & Board website (brettboard.dk) during the period 1996-2005.

Mik is working as an attendant at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, Denmark. Born in 1953, he began his first game club in 1964 and boardgames have played a large role in his life ever since. His interest has always focused on the genre of Family Strategy games.

Mike Clifford

Mike Clifford is a renown author, having scribed innumerable articles on general boardgames, wargames and sports games for a variety of magazines. Mike was a regular contributor to Sumo throughout its run. When Sumo folded, he was the moving spirit behind the launch of Counter Magazine.

His interest in boardgames goes back to early childhood and they became the hobby he never grew out of, with the area of interest gradually broadening as he discovered wargames, sportsgames and the British classics that Intellect Games produced in the early and mid seventies. By the late eighties he had become aware of the games being produced in Germany and around ten years ago his first trip to Essen turned him into a serious enthusiast.

Married with four children, he is a writer and businessman, who was born in London in 1948 and now lives with his family in Sussex, on the South Coast of England.

Mike Siggins

Mike Siggins´ name is one of the most recognized within the gaming hobby. For many years he edited and published Sumo magazine, which pioneered in-depth coverage of European games. He has also written for The Game Cabinet, Games International, Games Magazine, Interactive Fiction, Perfidious Albion and Strategy Plus. He served as a member of the editorial board of Games & Puzzles, and on the Daily Telegraph Game of the Year panel. He currently writes Gamer´s Notebook, for Battlegames and occasionally for Counter Magazine.

Mike has been playing all sorts of games for 35 years and writing about them for the last 25. He works at a large English university, and as a consultant in game design. He has several game designs to

his credit, and he is also developing boardgames for a major publisher, specialising in licensed properties.

His main gaming interests are innovative and thematic game systems, sports and historical subjects, and narrative atmosphere. His other interests include books, history, cinema, baseball, computer graphics, and cycling. Mike was born in 1961 and lives in The Fens, England.

Monsieur Phal

Peter Sarratt

Ronald Hoekstra

Ronald Hoekstra maintains one of the most popular gaming sites on the net, the Spelmagazijn (which means Game Storehouse in English) (www.spelmagazijn.com). He is an avid collector and player of games of all types, boasting a collection of over 1600 titles.

Ronald has been playing games since he was a small child, starting with cardgames with his parents and grandparents. Later, Risk and Diplomacy appeared. Eventually he was introduced to 1830 and other Avalon Hill games. He began collecting games and puzzles, with his interest in puzzles being attributed to the appearance of Rubik's Cube. All attention shifted to boardgaming again when he first attended Spiel in Essen. His interest (one could say 'obsession'!) in gaming led to his designing of the webpage Spelmagazijn, which is in Dutch. He is also a member of the jury of the Nederlandse Spellenprijs.

Born in Amsterdam in 1965, Ronald studied computer science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.

Stuart Dagger

Herb Levy

Since 1986, Herb Levy has been the force behind the Gamers Alliance, an international gaming network. Four times a year, the Alliance publishes the Gamers Alliance Report, which is dedicated to the discussion and review of games, as well as covering the latest news and trends within the industry.

Brooklyn, New York born and bred, Herb grew up on Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley classics, enjoying Avalon Hill offerings, dabbling in D&D, playing European games and more. He is a regular member of an extremely active gaming group and is a leading authority on board games new and old.

Herb sadly passed away in March 2023.

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