This has been out there for at least several years -- I actually think I found them back then because someone made a comment on here about it. Unfortunately, some of the very first articles on Melee appeared around Issue 11 or 12 -- which is unavailable on there. In fact, issues 9-13 are unavailable there. Which is kind of a bummer, since Steve Jackson put forth a number of rules there that eventually made it into ITL in modified forms, and it's interesting to see how the thinking evolved.
However you can get the rest of them (other than 9-13) there; at least up until the issue where Steve Jackson took over the magazine -- after that, you have to buy the PDFs from Warehouse 23. However, it seems to me well worth the price to do so, given that there are a lot of TFT articles and game rules questions being answered in there, for at least a year or two after SJ took over the mag. Plus there are a couple of contests and such as well that provide some good ideas for TFT.
The articles sort of petered out about the same time Metagaming closed it's doors in '82 or '83 (or maybe it was because Interplay started doing the same things, so Jackson stopped publishing as much on TFT), and after that, it's a rare issue indeed that even mentions TFT.
From: Jay Carlisle <maou.tsaou@gmail.com>
To: "tft@brainiac.com" <tft@brainiac.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 15, 2016 8:22 PM
Subject: The Space Gamer @ archive. org
Don't get too excited as the only issue I looked at had real issues looking like a first pass from an older bottom end OCR prog but a quick glance at it suggests there possibly could be at least partial text for those holes left by the handful of missing issues I recall last the list looked at it unless I missed something that already put content between those empty cover images Chris F sent I THINK... I'm not gonna be able to have a proper looksee without grinding to a halt here assuming the gnawing distraction doesn't derail Me anyway... This wouldn't be much of an issue if m$ $in10 $#!^ didn't have Me on four different craptops and primarily in various flavours of Linux because m$ can not exist on virtue of the products they produce/procure. It's the exclusive proprietary arrangements locking in m$ $#!^ as the only option available that underlies m$ "success". The best thing that cesspool of a company ever created was direct-x which basically gets m$ $#!^ outta the way of progress when performance is needed... anything else that rated "doesn't totally suck" was likely not a fully developed in house product with the not suck aspects the outsourced bits most likely... I'd look to purchase but $in10 shenanigans locking that malware tied to a virtual compulsory company store and a backdoor that amounts to bulldozing any existing structure to the slab and calling that a doorway and no worries about security as there's denada to break into... the best windows ever and Me not as crazy for putting pen and paper functionality as a primary design principle as it seemed when solar activity appeared to be a bigger risk than corporate policy in mucking up the use of devices in play for enough players that the 'inclusive not exclusive' design principle kicks in but I'm babbling I just realized but as it alludes to My technical issues at the moment I'll let it be or I'll have nothing ready for Sunday...