John Hill (game designer)

American designer of military wargames

John Evans Hill (February 21, 1945 – January 12, 2015) was an American designer of military board wargames, as well as rules for miniature wargaming. He is best known as the designer of the Avalon Hill board game Squad Leader and the American Civil War miniatures game Johnny Reb. He was inducted into the Charles Roberts Awards Hall of Fame.

John Evans Hill never knew his biological father, John T. Hill, who was killed in action during World War II while his mother Marian Jane Hill was pregnant. John Evans Hill was born on February 21, 1945, in Chicago and grew up in Elmhurst, Illinois. When Hill was three years old, his mother married Edward F. Whitley, who became the man Hill identified as his father. Hill also had a half brother, Richard Whitley, a notable film and television writer. Hill was raised as a Catholic, attending and graduating from Immaculate Conception High School. After high school, Hill attended Purdue University and graduated with a four year degree in Military History.

John Hill founded the Conflict Games Company in the late 1960s and owned a hobby store, the Scale Model Shop, in Lafayette, Indiana, for several years. It has been reported the Scale Model Shop was lost in a flood.

During this time, Hill had become interested in traditional miniatures wargaming, which did not use a hex grid map but required measurement of the actual physical distance between miniature soldiers. Although this had traditionally only been used for Napoleonic era wargames, Hill developed a modern day miniatures game with a World War II setting that used platoon sized groups and their individual officers. He attempted to sell the new miniatures game to Avalon Hill. Although the game company was interested in the game's focus on the platoon, it convinced Hill to convert the game to a conventional hex grid map using standard cardboard counters. The result was 1977's Squad Leader, one of the most popular wargames ever produced. Hill also worked on Cross of Iron, the first expansion module for Squad Leader, published in 1979. By this time, Hill's reputation as a game designer was sufficiently high that when Simulations Publications, Inc. published his Battle for Stalingrad in 1980, his name appeared on the box cover. Likewise when Mayfair Games republished Battle for Hue (retitled simply Hue) in 1982, Hill's name was featured prominently on the box cover. This happened again when Eastern Front Tank Leader was published by West End Games in 1986.

Hill married Luella Burton in 1969, and the couple raised a daughter. After spending many years in Northern Virginia, where he also served as a military analyst for the U. S. Government, Hill retired to New Mexico. Hill died on January 12, 2015, at Christus St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe, New Mexico.