Together with Stuart Dagger and Mike Clifford, Alan How formed Counter magazine magazine in February 1998, having been involved with Sumo for some years. Counter is now recognized as a most worthy successor to Sumo and has quickly gained acclaim as one of the finest gaming journal in the hobby today.Alan was born in 1957 and is a Chartered Accountant and Finance Director of a consumer organisation in the UK. He has been playing games for over 35 years. The collecting bug started when he was age 11 when he realised that his games would last longer than his friends’ visits to the pub. To date this has meant accumulating over 2500 games.Amongst his favourite games are Cosmic Encounter, the 18xx series and Civilization, though the last 13 years of German visits has made him re-consider these as being the top three. Alan enjoys playing most board games, and while he only rarely plays wargames now, he finds very few games that disagree with him. This leads to his positive and refreshing outlook on games, which is to look for the best aspects of a game rather than the weak issues. Alan enjoys game systems as much as playing games, with particular admiration for interactive game systems, such as the treasury/marker tokens in Civilization.
In October 2020, Alan became President of the IGA.
