i hear you. most of my war gaming was with the squad leader/advanced squad leader system but i also played a good bit of up front, third reich, and panzerblitz/panzer leader.
i did play a couple of spi games and their napoleonic game, la grande armee, was actually a fairly playable simulation of early 19th century warfare. the other game, freedom in the galaxy, was dreadful.
that said, during the geocities era of web 1.0 (or maybe even 0.1 
) i ran across a proto-blog that described in loving detail the turn by turn play of a game of campaign for north africa conducted by the author and 5 of his friends with three people on each side. they had gotten about a third of the way through the game when either they ran out of enthusiasm or something.
