"Líder" magazine was a publication mainly dedicated to war and role-playing games over a long time, the second of its type in the Spanish market.
In its first issues between 1979 and 1986, it was published as a fanzine under the title of MS by "Maquetismo y Simulación" ('Model-making and Simulation', that latter term referring to simulation games, mainly war and role-playing games). Maquetismo y Simulación was, in Barcelona, the first Spanish club dealing with simulation games. It was founded a year sooner, in 1978. The printing and publishing of its fanzine was mainly hand-made and hadn't yet any legal deposit or any other kind of legal registration. At that point the president of the club was Alfons Cànovas. Alongside with the fanzine creator, Joaquín Tena, and with Enrique Jimeno, Carlos Niño and Lluís Salvador, all of them the five founding members of the club, Cànovas supervised the publishing of the fanzine until 1982, when he left it, just to be substituted as president by another member of the club: Xavier Pérez Rotllán.
In 1982 Rotllán started a new numbering of the MS fanzine, becoming an officially recognized magazine in 1984 with the registration of its first legal deposit number (B-10502-84, where B stands for 'Barcelona' and 84 for '1984'). During those years, from 1982 to 1986, considered as the first official stage of the magazine, 17 MS issues had been published.
Between 1986 and 1987, Rotllán launched the second stage, improving the presentation and changing its name to "Líder" which remained until the end. During those years, 5 issues were published without interruption from March 1986 (for number 1) to June 1987 (for number 5). At that point, in 1987, Rotllán left Maquetismo y Simulación, just to found his own Publishing house, Ludopress, and launch his own war games specialized magazine, Alea.
From 1987 to 1998, the Líder magazine publishing wrights changed their owner from the Maquetismo y Simulación club to Joc Internacional, a Barcelona publishing house leaded and founded by Francesc Matas Salla since 1985. As of 1988 Joc Internacional boosted its presence in Spain with the publication of role-playing games, a time in which it experienced its most prolific stage. With Joc Internacional the bimonthly printings of Líder had around 5,000 to 10,000 printings, and became one of the principal sources for the fans. At that moment it was still one of the few publications that talked about role-playing games, although "Troll" was already on sale since 1986. Troll was the first Spanish magazine to be officially specialized on role-playing games. Instead of that, Líder dealed with all kind of simulation games, including tabletop, tactical and war games. Its content wasn't then exclusively related to role-playing games, it also had content continued from its earlier issues like modelling, simulation and other related subjects. As of 1994, and due to the success of the Magic game, Líder started offering content and articles dealing with collectible card games.
62 issues were published in total, followed by a sudden cancellation in 1998 provoked by the economic problems by "Joc Internacional". A number 63 exists, but never saw the light of day and was instead published as a special issue by the successors of the magazine.
Between 1999 and 2002, the publishing house "La Caja de Pandora" resumed its publication, enhancing the videogames contents, never well deserved until then by the past stages of the magazine. Its bimonthly edition increased the print run until hitting 25,000 issues and restarted the publication in the Latin-American market (Joc Internacional started first, in the midle 1990s).
During its last stage between 2002 and 2003, "Líder" magazine merged with the magazine "Arena" by "Proyectos Editoriales Crom". Their content was different: "Arena" more dedicated to card games. The role-playing content was reduced and only 5 issues were published before finally ending that collaboration.
