The last issue of 1980 gives us a Phil Foglio cover, but unusually it isn’t really Holiday themed, either cover wise or in terms of content, although there’s a candy cane to be found on the cover as the only hint that this is December. Not that I mind. 

Anyway this is, also unusually, a fiction heavy issue with a new Gardner F. Fox story taking up a portion of the magazine, the other big feature is a new game, Food Fight, which is what the cover is referring to.

 In terms of D&D content this is a comparatively light issue, but what we do have are a number of articles on Genetics in Fantasy which really is a subject that would have been better left alone as the attempt to justify racial differences in the 4 “genetics” articles here, written by a bunch of white fantasy and gaming enthusiasts rather than geneticists are just misguided conversations that often skirt around racism when they don’t roundly fall into it. Leomund’s Tiny Hut discusses the much safer, and more relevant, topic of how to measure strength in monsters in a time when stat blocks didn’t give STR values to monsters, or any other ability values really. We get the usual Bestiary and comic strips and we’re done for 1980!