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.

Mark Bigney

Mark is the co-host of the So Very Wrong About Games podcast. A native of Montreal, he has been a hobbyist gamer since the age of ten and enjoys euros, consims, miniatures games, thinky spreadsheets, trashy slugfests, economic knife fights, and the occasional RPG.

Michael Walker

Michael is the other half of the podcast So Very Wrong About Games. I love this tabletop hobby. I love how open, diverse and accepting it is. We sometimes only have one chance to show newcomers how great this boardgaming community is so I strive every day to be that voice. I love dexterity games, games that support a narrative, and rules that flow.

Stefanie Kethers

Stefanie grew up in Germany and has fond memories of playing board games with family and friends from a very young age. Her parents introduced her to traditional card games like Canasta, Romme, and Skat. In high school, she was the only girl joining her male classmates in playing Doppelkopf, another traditional German card game. At university, she became more interested in board games and started reading German games magazines such as Spielbox and Poeppel-Revue, as well as online games magazines and reviews. When one of her favourite sites, Luding (luding.org) was in danger of being discontinued, she took over hosting of the site and was one of two people maintaining Luding from 1998 until 2003.

Stefanie moved to Australia in 2001, after finishing her phD in Computer Science. She is on the Boardgames Australia committee and has been a board games teacher at PAX AUS for the last few years.

Sazan Vissering

When I was younger I remember fondly playing games with my grandma, but I've really started playing board games with friends roughly since 1999. We started visiting Spiel in Essen yearly from 2003 onward.

I've always been interested in tracking what I play, so in that period I made a little database with a website, so everybody could see who played what, and who won. After a while I didn't keep up with this, but when Eerko (my husband) and I started playing more and more games, I started logging them again and I wanted an easy way to do this, this culminated in co-authoring the statistics app Board Game Stats.

I mostly play board games with Eerko, so I view most game from a two-player perspective. Having said that, my favourite game is Tichu, which is played with four. If I look at our stats, I see we play an average of about 200 different games per year, and about 70 to 80 of those are new to us. Eerko and I love learning new games, but also really enjoy playing old favourites from our collection.

Ben Baldanza

Ben Baldanza has contributed reviews to Counter Magazine, The Game Report, Rail Gamer and the Funagain Web Site. He is an avid gamer and has an impressive collection of games, both mainstream and hard-to-find titles.Born in 1961, Ben is married to Marcia, another avid gamer. Ben now lives in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, but has lived in and been part of successful gaming groups in Houston, Texas, McLean, Virginia and San Salvador, El Salvador. He started playing games as a child in Rome, New York. These started as mostly Italian card games with his mother, graduating to family board games and some wargames in college. He stopped gaming for a while after college, and was reunited with the hobby when introduced to some of the "German Invasion" games in the early 1990's.Ben holds degrees from both Syracuse University and Princeton University and has held multiple positions with various airline companies throughout his career. Today, he is the CEO of Spirit Airlines, a major US airlines that is publicly traded using the ticker SAVE. Aside from gaming, Ben likes to be a good husband and dad, run, and play trombone in local area groups. Ben and Marcia have a son, Enzo, who is a budding gamer in his own right. Their dog, Karl-Heinz, is a dachshund who loves to sleep during gaming sessions with one eye opened, waiting for a snack to be dropped.

He particularly enjoys development games, transport or "network" type games, any odd game or dexterity game and trick-taking card games. Ben also keeps an eye out for games that are easy to teach to non-gamers as a way to grow participation in the hobby.

Joel Eddy

In 1999, Joel was smacked over the head by a little known Euro game, Löwenherz. From that point he began a process of investigating all things gaming and rekindling that lost love from child hood. In early 2011 Joel Eddy established Drive Thru Review on YouTube, and embarked on an endeavor to review a variety of games that have flown under the radar of the mainstream. The reviews are also intended to give the viewer a better sense of the game’s theme and try to touch on the relationship that the game and its mechanisms have to the subject matter, as well as the social environment established by the game.

Joel currently works as a software engineer in Northern Idaho where he lives with his wife and two sons.

Melissa Rogerson

Melissa Rogerson was born in Melbourne, Australia. Through her childhood, her parents ran a shop selling children’s games and books, and her father ran a Bridge club. Her life is speckled with "games" milestones. In 1983, she attended her first gaming convention (for RPGs) and met her future husband. In 1996, she represented Victoria on its Youth Bridge team at the Australian National Championships. From 2014-2017, she managed the Tabletop gaming area at PAX Australia, a three-day festival of gaming held in Melbourne.

A fluent German speaker, Melissa has translated a number of popular boardgames from German to English. She has contributed to the Gone Gaming blog, Boardgame News and The Opinionated Gamers since 2005, and has run many boardgame clubs and events at local schools and libraries. She is a member and former co-chair of Boardgames Australia, is a member of the Steering Committee for Melbourne International Games Week, and regularly appears on radio to discuss boardgames.

In 2018, she completed her PhD research project, titled “Between Cardboard and Computer: Modern European Boardgames and Digitisation”. She works as a lecturer in the School of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne, where she teaches subjects in Human-Computer interaction and Information Systems. She continues to research boardgames, with a focus on the materiality of tabletop games as well as on the use and adoption of digital tools in tabletop game play. Her research is available through her website https://www.melissarogerson.com

Melissa and her husband Fraser have two adult daughters and two cats.

Scott Alden

Scott Alden is the co-creator and programmer behind the scenes of the BoardGameGeek website. BoardGameGeek is one of the web's premiere English language websites dedicated to the board gaming hobby.Scott began gaming in earnest during his college years at the University of Florida and plays games with the Dallas Metrogamers weekly.

W. Eric Martin

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