About

Welcome to Table Top History, LLC.  I'm Pete Pellegrino, a retired USN commander and former Naval Flight Officer, currently employed by Netsimco supporting the US Naval War College’s War Gaming Department as lead for game design and adjudication and lecturing on game related topics for the department’s war gaming courses.  

In addition to my work with professional war games, I've had the opportunity to conduct business "war games" for Fortune 500 companies, consult for major toy and game companies, and run historic simulations for middle, high school, and college students.

I began designing naval war games in 2001 when I purchased two large toy battleships for my sons.  After watching the boys push them around the living room floor and argue about “who shot who,” I devised some simple dice rules for them, but not much more.  Later cards, more ships, tokens and special pieces were added and Sink the Bismarck! as a play-on-the floor team game was born. 

In parallel with developing STB I began drawing on my experience as a professional war game designer with the US Naval War College and in 2005 began contributing naval table top designs to Junior General, a website owned by Matt Fritz, a middle school teacher with the intent to “promote the use of historical simulations as a tool for teaching history by providing free resources that anyone can use.”  This low cost approach increases the willingness to try games, and side steps the cost barrier facing most public schools.  With Junior General, games are designed such that all playing pieces other than common items such as dice can be downloaded (i.e. paper-based) and are suitable for the classroom in terms of time, space and number of players.  Designing under these conditions contributed significantly toward my thoughts on the gaming experience.

At the same time I was researching the Battle of Trafalgar as the famous naval battle's 200th anniversary was approaching.  That ultimately resulted in another large play-on-the-floor game Trafalgar, which is played annually at the US Naval War College.  Other games such as Battle of Midway and Jutland soon followed.

After years of playing Convoy, Battle of Jutland and Zeppelins Over London with East Greenwich High School students as part of their WW1 studies, I developed Through Mud and Blood, a massive trench warfare game where combat is resolved not with dice, but through the skillful throwing of pom-poms at the enemy positions.  In early 2020, I designed and executed a pandemic game Contagion for Dartmouth College (which proved to be eerily prescient) that we followed up in 2023 with Outbreak.

For the purpose of promoting and conducting STB, I organized Table Top History, LLC.  We put on STB and other "big games" for scout troops, sea cadets, school students, youth groups, history clubs, corporate off-sites, anyone who remembers how much fun it is to get down on the floor and play!