Strategy & Tactics was first published in January 1967 under its original editor, Chris Wagner, intended as a better alternative to Avalon Hill's magazine, The General.
In addition to the games, the magazine featured many articles on military history, many of them notable for applying modern quantitative analysis to battles that had traditionally been described in a narrative "heroic" style.
(A single experiment in using the S&T game format to explore the use of strategy and tactics in professional sports, Scrimmage, in issue #37, was not repeated.)
Circulation of the magazine was substantial and games that might not otherwise sell went to subscribers automatically, eclipsing expected independent sales of most titles.
[1]: 101 S&T's circulation exceeded that of Avalon Hill's The General by the mid-1970s, improving its physical appearance dramatically under the guidance of Redmond Simonsen.
S&T eventually made its magazine games available for purchase in stores with standard boxes, dice and counter trays, and also sold boxes and counter trays separately for the convenience of subscribers who wanted to store their subscriber game components in something other than the envelope the magazine had been delivered in.
Such faith was placed in the future of the industry that a Game Designer's Guild was even created, in the hope that it just might be possible to earn a comfortable living providing wargames to the public.
In 1980 Strategy & Tactics spun off Ares magazine, which focused more on science-fiction and fantasy, and featured a game in every issue.
Avalon Hill remained a bigger company, but only because it sold many more sports and general interest games than wargames.
One innovation of S&T was its feedback system, in which readers could answer various multiple-choice questions on a return card, whose data would then be entered into a Burroughs minicomputer for analysis.
SPI's design staff moved on to Avalon Hill, where they set up a subsidiary company based in New York called Victory Games.
By this time, other companies were also stepping up production, and a splintered market ensured that the days of selling 50,000 copies or more of a title were gone.
3W's Keith Poulter later left the business, and in 1991 Strategy & Tactics was sold to Decision Games, which has been publishing the magazine since issue #140 (February 1991).
In 2003, Decision Games spun off Strategy & Tactics Press as a sister company for magazine and media development.
[2] Strategy & Tactics won thirteen Charles S. Roberts/Origins Awards between 1974 and 2009, and in 1997 the magazine was inducted into the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame.