My brother, Dave Dobson (of Snood fame), and I used to play a lot of Myth II, which is a real-time wargame with lots of little units getting chopped up. We had all kinds of fun until I moved to California and he moved to North Carolina, putting us in wildly different time zones, which killed our late-night gaming sessions.

But the urge to duel to the death kept burning. Worse, since we're men and don't call one another randomly to chat, we weren't staying in touch. So we tried a lot of wargames with hotseat and primitive play-by-email components. We were dissatisfied, though; the games took forever, the interface to email was clumsy, the gameplay often concentrated a lot on slow base-building and not so much on fighting, and looked a bit odd when you were trying to play it at work.

I wanted to do a little bit of gaming all day during coffee breaks and iong compiles---just a constant-but-not-overwhelming stream of fun and an excuse to bug my brother. Version 0.0 of LGGWG was born with a great deal of help from Sara, and all my core testers (Alex, SarahMac, and Dave) were a great help shaping it.

Now, years and innumerable versions later, it's ready to face the world. We've added features like 6-way games, mines, unit trading, and more. Still, though, the heart of the design lives on: fast, fun email wargaming for people who are supposed to be working.