Richard Berg passed.

BGG wargamers fawning over him too, yes. It's weird bc independent of the personality I don't think the games have been consistently good. His best shit is codesigned with Mark Herman iirc, and Mark Herman has been vastly more successful in making consistently interesting games outside of partnership. Is Successors Herman or Simonitch?

On personality, depends on your norms. I'm not out here to run the guy's legacy down but I'm not a believer in the don't speak ill of the dead norm for a lot of reasons that would be a new topic. ymmv.

I just thought his stuff felt like with wasn't completely thought-through. Intellectually intriguing, but not brought to completion.

To be honest, I recognize the name, but offhand I couldn't tell you what games Berg designed. No slight against him, just that I don't normally think of games in terms of designers, except for several FFG veterans who I met while I worked there.

Looking through BGG, I see that I have a bit of familiarity with some Berg games:

Blackbeard - A friend bought this but couldn't figure out how to play. He remembered that I had some war-gaming experience, so he loaned it to me in hopes that I could figure out the rules. Two years later, we tried to play a three-player game with his roommate, but the weight of the chrome rules dragged the game down and we gave up after a four hours. The roommate wasn't really up for such a heavy game.

The Campaign for North Africa - Long before BGG, this game was infamous for being unplayably long. During my teenage war-gaming years, my best friend bought this and we were going to try to play through it. But his family moved about an hour's drive away, so we couldn't meet up very often. We spent a long afternoon setting up a scenario for this game, and only had an hour left to actually start playing. We never played it again.

War of the Ring (1st edition) - My best friend and I played it a few times. It was a curious hybrid of wargame and rpg, with both players controlling some key characters as well as major armies. The characters had hit points, but the armies functioned like typical war game units. It was long and fiddly, and there is no reason why a modern gamer should play this edition instead of the modern version.

And that's it. Berg designed a lot of games, and I have played almost none of them. In hindsight, I guess I wasn't much of a war-gamer. I probably played a total of ten different war games back then.

Gary Sax wrote: BGG wargamers fawning over him too, yes. It's weird bc independent of the personality I don't think the games have been consistently good. His best shit is codesigned with Mark Herman iirc, and Mark Herman has been vastly more successful in making consistently interesting games outside of partnership. Is Successors Herman or Simonitch?

Maybe that's why I love GBoH and dislike Men of Iron despite similarity in design. GBoH is alloyed with Herman and Men of Iron is pure Berg.

Tom Russell (from wargaming indie darling outfit Hollandspiele) posted a unique casual remembrance of Richard Berg today.

https://hollandspiele.com/blogs/hollandazed-thoughts-ideas-and-miscellany/berg

I had to giggle reading that trolling people online was fun for Berg, and he considered it a hobby.
Also contained a decent passage:

And Richard said to me that it didn't really matter how much or how little money someone made; the number itself doesn't matter. "If you have enough money so that you're comfortable, so that you can do some things that make you happy, go out to eat once in a while, that's all anyone ever needs. That's what it's for."