State of Play: Tel Danith - 14 September 1115 (Commands & Colors: Medieval – Crusades Exp.)

 

Camping, Crusader-style.

Sometimes I feel bad for my long-time Monday game night partner and longer-time brother-in-law, T. In all flavours of Commands & Colors we’re pretty evenly matched. But every so often the gods of dice and cards take umbrage at some perceived offence, and in their petty manner they contrive to deny him any gaming satisfaction.

To wit, this week we played at T’s place, so, of course, a scenario from the Crusades Expansion* (GMT Games, 2024) for Commands & Colors: Medieval (GMT Games 2019), as set up and ready to go when I arrived. This time, it was Tel Danith; I went to sit on the Seljuk side, but T insisted I was to take charge of the Crusader forces. After our previous exchange and the humbling 6-0 defeat he recently suffered as the Seljuks at Harran, T would have been eager to return to the Crusader camp, but he insisted, and I didn’t argue.

Initial set-up.

On the face of it, the Seljuks may have an advantage in numbers – twenty units on the board, compared with the Crusaders’ fourteen. For mobility the Seljuks have fourteen mounted units to the Crusaders’ eight, although five of those are Knight Cavalry. On top of that, all the Seljuk Medium Cavalry are armed with bows. Personal artillery seems to have a greater diminishing effect in C&C Medieval than in any other flavour of Command & Colors.

I’ve learned the hard way not to underestimate a smaller Crusader force (again playing the Seljuks), receiving a particularly clarifying lesson on the shores of Lake Antioch. There, a combination of the disfavour of the card and dice gods on my part, along with some clever execution of orders and outstanding rolls on T’s side, saw an 8-1 victory for the Crusaders.

First blood (and poor sticker application).

The situation in this scenario is as follows; supporting Crusader forces gathered to Baldwin I of Jerusalem’s aid when news was received of an invasion lead by Bursuq under the auspices of the Sultan. When Bursuq heard of the gathering force, he demurred, crossing the border once again. When some of the Crusader forces had dispersed, Bursuq, himself having lost some of his forces due to internal disputes, chose to attack Jerusalem with his own diminished but still viable army. Baldwin’s superior intelligence warned him of the danger, and he rode out to meet the treat, descending on Bursuq’s army while they were setting camp. The Seljuks counterattacked, but at the end of the day, the bloodied Crusaders prevailed.

The first five Orders for the Crusaders,

My Crusaders opened with movement on the Right flank, making for the camp tiles on that side. A special rule states that if a Crusader unit occupies a Camp hex at the beginning of their turn, the player can remove it; when all four are removed, the Crusader player earns a permanent victory banner. It took five rounds to accomplish, but the decampment of the Seljuk aggressors earned my fourth banner.

In all, the bout covered eight rounds. Auxilia, Medium Infantry, and Light Bow Cavalry fell like wheat before the scythe. Everywhere was blood and fear.

End state.

Whatever led to T’s loss, it could not be blamed on a lack of fighting spirit. With what cards he had (and with the occasional murmur of, “Who dealt this rubbish?”), he brought the fight to the Crusaders. This may have been his downfall. In the same situation, I would have (where I could) use my light troops as artillery, trying to pick off the enemy as I could with arrows and javelins rather than committing them to near certain death. In consecutive ruounds, two banners were secured for the Crusaders by defending units putting multiple retreat results on Seljuq Light Cavalry, forcing them off the board

If I have a score advantage, I can often get a little callous with my troops, taking greater risks to press an advantage. I’m willing to risk the loss of a unit or even a leader if it will bring me closer to victory. In this case, an Order Two Units Left allowed me to activate the Turcopole Light Bow Cavalry on my Left who, capitalising on their accomplishments on the previous turn, gained the last three banners I needed to secure a win of 8-0.

Seljuq banners and casualties.

T must have greatly offended the gods of chance. While his Seljuq army (at least the ones he could bring into the contest with his limited card options) fought bravely, and sent many Crusader souls to their eternal rest, he once again could not gain a single banner.

 

* I tend to use the Crusades Expansion as short-hand for what, in truth, should be referred to as “Commands & Colors: Medieval – Expansion #1 Crusades Mid-Eastern Battles I”. This distinction is crucial, as the I at the end of Mid-Eastern Battles suggests at least a second set in development, and, of course, the Holy Land wasn’t the only place that saw Crusader battles. I for one would be overjoyed to see an expansion covering major battles from the Northern Crusades, a crucial but often overlooked portion of European history.

2025 Q3 Report: the loneliness of the long-distance blogger

 

The art of the long view (Artillery forward observer, Guadalcanal, 1942). 

 

You can also check out my previous activities for 2025 in the Quarterly Reports for Q1 and Q2, if you really have nothing better to do with your time.

 

And suddenly here we are at the end of September (at time of writing) so. three-quarters of the way through the year, it’s time to look back, evaluate and remonstrate in a Quarterly Report. This is the third for the calendar year; long-term readers will be familiar with the format, and I’m confident new visitors will be able to work it out as they go, so I’ll skip the long preamble and get to it.

 

Games played

I have two “regular” game nights in a given week, Mondays with my brother-in-law who I refer to as T, and Wednesday, which has been a thing now for eighteen years. I put inverted commas around regular because, in the words of Yogi Berra, “In theory, there’s no difference between Theory and Practice, but in practice, there is.”

Congestion on the Club Route; WWII Commander - Market Garden.

Last year, the Wednesday group got quite a few wargames – some boardgames, some miniatures - in among the occasional Role-Playing Game. In the last couple of years we’ve been doing a tour of the classics, getting Here I Stand (GMT Games, 2006), Republic of Rome (Avalon Hill, 1990), Successors (Fourth Ed. - Phalanx, 2021) and Empires of the Ancient World (Warfrog, 2000). This year, the roles have reversed (no pun intended), and RPGs are the order of the day, punctuated with (usually) a couple of weeks of historical minis. On this front, we got some table time with some English Civil War action using the Pikeman’s Lament (Osprey Games, 2017). I really quite like these rules; they are simple enough to pick up at the table, and don’t get too fussy regarding manoeuvre. A given unit roll a handful of dice in attack until its reduced to half strength, then the dice are halved. Two games played as the Royalists, the first convincingly won, the second comprehensively lost, but a lot of fun both times.

As mentioned, all the other weeks were taken up with role-playing. In early July we finished up a game of Cartel (Magpie Games, 2020). We went on to Daggerheart (Darrington Press, 2025) for about seven sessions, and the last couple of weeks we’ve been playing Mothership 1E (Tuesday Knight Games, 2024). Variety is the spice of life, so I’m told.

C&C Medieval: the Crusades - Battle of Harran set-up, with Claude. He is clumsy
 of tail and dismissive of games generally, but very affectionate,
and likes nothing more than sitting on PACs.

As for Monday (sometimes Tuesday) Night games, we managed six games out of twelve weeks, a little better than I had anticipated. Most of the off-weeks were from T being overseas, either recreationally or with work. We’ve played a lot of scenarios from the Crusades Expansion (GMT Games, 2024) for Commands & Colors: Medieval (GMT Games, 2019) this year, three just this quarter. I also managed to get three other games (two which only arrived this quarter). Here’s the short list, with accompanying write-ups:

- Dawn’s Early Light: the War of 1812 (Compass Games, 2020) (Ten Game Challenge AAR)

- C&C: M (C) – Ascalon AAR, Harran ARR, Tel Danith (EDIT: AAR can be found here)

- WWII Commander, Vol. 2: Market Garden (Compass Games, 2025) (unboxing; AAR)

- Breizh 1341 (Shakos, 2022) (unboxing; AAR)

I feel like I’ve stalled at four games ticked off my Ten Wargame Challenge list. The War Room, the YouTube program that has run variations on a Ten Game Challenge for the last four or five years. At the beginning of this year, people were invited to submit a list of ten games they intended to play, along with two substitute titles they could swap out for games in the main list. I posted my list here, and on idjester’s Tac-Up Facebook group; Jester kept log of everyone’s submissions and ticked off the games when we would post proof of play – photos or an AAR – to the group.

Mike's experiment in Democracy

Recently the show was disbanded, and I haven’t heard anything conclusive about the future of the Challenge. Meandering Mike (who hosts one of my favourite YouTube channels - go subscribe if you haven't already - I'll wait) posted a survey for his viewers regarding whether he should proceed with his list. I voted in the “finish the complete list” camp, so I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t at least make an effort to finish mine. I have four down, with another six to go. I may get it done, but if I don’t complete ten games total, I should be able to squeeze in another three or four at least. I’m resigned to playing most or all of whatever I get done on my own, with the possible exceptions of Panzer Battles: 11th Panzer on the Chir River (Multi-Man Publishing, 2016), Waterloo, 1815: Fallen Eagles II (Hexasim, 2022), and possibly A Most Fearful Sacrifice: the Three Days of Gettysburg (Flying Pig Games, 2022).

 

Collection development

I have been trying to wind back the number of games I’ve been buying, but the actual numbers suggest otherwise. This quarter saw the collection grow nearly as much as the last two combined. Some of this was from games I’d already paid for; a number of crowd-funded games arrive, as well as some preorders. I have been deciding against buying some games, or postponing purchases, but I’ve also been picking up some titles on the second-hand market. The fact is, I’ve received nearly as many games in the first three quarters of 2025 as I did in the whole of 2024.

Around the first week of July I received my January P500 orders from GMT. This was their first experiment with Australia-friendly shipping, and it took a little longer than anyone expected. I wasn’t panicking, but I was relieved when a box arrived containing Fields of Fire, Deluxe Edition (GMT Games, 2025), Fighting Formations: US 29th Infantry Division (GMT Games, 2025 – you can check out my unboxing post here), In the Shadows (GMT Games, 2025 – unboxing post here), and the 2025 Replacement Counter-sheet.

Also arriving this quarter was the monumental Rock of Chickamauga (Flying Pig Games, 2025), the second volume n the Black Swan series. I had said I should have an unboxing post of the first volume, A Most Fearful Sacrifice, but that’s been let slide, like a couple of other games. Now Chickamauga has arrived, it’s an opportunity to do a compare and contrast, either as a single post or back to back posts.

Third Quarter haul. Missing are 1811 Albuera, and the
Replacement Counter Sheet from GMT.

I’m a relatively new convert to Gamefound. Around the beginning of the year, I backed three separate projects on the platform, and this quarter two of them found their way to my door. The first was a Shakos game, Rex Britannorum (Shakos, 2025 – get a peek here), to which I’d added a copy of their reprinted Breizh 1341 (see above). Next was 1811: Albuera, Second Edition (Tactical Workshop, 2025 – unboxing here). I’m hoping to see my other outstanding Gamefound preorder this coming quarter - Carl Paradis’s Battle Commander, Volume 1 (Sound of Drums ~2025), the first in a series of (as I understand it) six volumes covering he major theatres of the Napoleonic Wars. Volume 1 will cover Napoleon’s Italian campaigns. More on this, of course, when it arrives.

One of the reasons for the no-game Mondays mentioned above was T being overseas a lot. This included a trip to San Francisco for a medical conference.  Which meant an order from Noble Knight Games. I’d settled on just two games (like I said, I’m trying to rein in my acquisitions a little); I picked Napoleon’s Wheel (Operational Studies Group, 2020), and Radetzky’s March: The Road to Novara (Dissimula Editzioni, 2023), the second edition Sergio Schiavi’s first release through his company, Dissimula Editzioni. Nineteenth century conflicts are becoming more of a focus for me, both in reading and games, at least when I get a chance to play something that isn’t Commands and Colors: Medieval.

At the last minute I added WWII Commander, Volume 2: Market Garden (links above, in the Games played section). We’ve had a lot of fun with its sister game, WWII Commander, Volume 1: Battle of the Bulge (Compass Games, 2020), so it was an easy choice.

I also made a couple of opportunistic purchases of second-hand games that showed up on my radar. After long resistance to going down the GBoH rabbit-hole (too hard, too fussy, too expensive), I gave in and bought a very reasonably-priced, partially (less than a half a counter-sheet) punched copy of The Great Battles of Alexander: the Macedonian Art of War (GMT, 2015), which I may yet have resisted if it hadn’t been the 2023 printing which incorporated the Tyrant expansion (GMT Games, 2003), which brought up the number of scenarios to an impressive thirty-one. I haven’t factored this into my play schedule for the year, but having crossed this particular Rubicon, I may try to get it to the table in the coming year, which really isn’t all that far away.

My other second-hand purchases were also GMT games; an unpunched copy of the 1914: Glory’s End / When Eagles Fight Dual Pack (GMT Games, 2014), and a pre-loved Grand Illusion: Mirage of Glory, 1914 (GMT Games, 2004), both by Ted Raicer, the man who literally wrote the book on the subject - Crowns in the Gutter (Strategy & Tactics Press, 2010). I don’t have a lot of WWI games, and I didn’t have any that cover the Eastern Front, so another collection gap is now filled.

The Defiant One. Eustace, brother to Claude, is his sibling's opposite in nature.
He's a biter and is not satisfied until he draws blood, and he doesn't like me
very much, but to his credit he is generally respectful of set-up games.

I've played Breizh 1341 twice now, and tinkered with Rex Britannorum and Into the Shadows. I'm hoping to spend some time between now and Christmas getting to know the Fighting Formations system better, and I'm currently reading the series rules for the Library of Napoleonic Battles series; this is another one I'd like to noodle around with by myself before I try to introduce anyone else to it. 

 

Blog activity

A Fast Game saw a mere fifteen posts this quarter, an average of five a month. That's more than some quarters past, but I think I can do better.My posting cycle has been patchy at best, with long breaks in transmission, followed by feverish attempts to catch up. In July I only put up three posts. This was supposed to be four, but I mis-timed the posting of my last Quarterly Report by a couple of hours and slipped into the June count. I made a little better effort with six posts in August, and another six in September. Of these, six were unboxing posts (under the auspices of Stripped Down for Parts; unboxings are something I’ve talked about here and elsewhere before, but I want to come back to in a bit), five After Action Reports (these are mostly what appear under the heading, State of Play), and my first Feature piece and a follow-up Executive Summary of the report’s findings, one Public Service Announcement, and a belated, bedevilled review.

L'Estocq prevails at Elbing. Napoléon 1807.

To wit, I finally posted a review of Napoléon 1807 (Shakos, 2020 – you can find that here). Despite my best intentions, I’ve slipped on reviews this year. Part of my shortfall is due to the games I’ve been playing of late. When I do get a game in it is more often than not something I’ve already reviewed (I present Exhibit A – C&C Medieval). As I’ve stated numerous times, I’m not comfortable playing a game’s shortest scenario just once, then proclaiming a deep enough understanding of it to advise others on its qualities, which is essentially what a review does. My stated low limit is three games played before I start preparing a review, then I’ll try to get another play or two in before completing it. I played Napoleon 1807 eight or nine times over about six months (time away from a game to think about it and its possibilities is also crucial, in my opinion). Revisiting a game will offer more insight into what is happening, how the whole set of systems and sub-systems work to create a narrative of conflict, with all its vagaries, missteps, and accidents happy and unhappy. Nobody can rightly claim to understand a game after a single play. At best they may be able to discuss the superficial or surface interactions of the game’s systems. I’m rarely playing a new game as it was intended to be played before the second game; embarrassingly, sometimes it takes a third run to get that far. I’ve read or seen too many reviews or (more honestly) first impressions where the reviewer seems to be talking about a different game to the one in front of them, I get there’s pressure to put out new content, but every game, even the less than great ones, deserve some time spent and consideration given. A Fast Game is probably not the place to come if you want reviews of the latest games, but hopefully the reviews I post will be worth the reader’s time. Here the rant endeth.

I’ve recently realised something about myself and the way I engage with wargames. When I’m playing a game, if I’m enjoying it, I rarely experience any difficulty immersing myself in the unfolding narrative, feeling every small win or setback, every bit of the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat, even if I play it down in front of an opponent. Yet when I come to think back on the game I’ve just played, usually a couple of days later if I’m writing an AAR, I find myself capable only of engaging with the remembered game analytically, in terms of mechanics and the quirks of fortune. I’m not sure there’s anything I can do about that, but some readers seem to like the play-reports I’ve been posting, so I will probably stick to what we have going on for now, but I’m a little in awe of those that can spin a story out of the raw facts of the mechanical results of a game in their retelling.

The numbers say I'm doing something right. Over the last three months, A Fast Game has had a little shy of 9,600 visits, a little over three thousand a month (though in reality, July was a stellar month for visits, my second highest after June 2025, then I slumped to barely seventeen hundred in August). Most visitors just come in through the front page and read whatever is most recently posted, but seven posts - a mix of reviews, AARs and a couple of unboxings - are hitting near or over four hundred direct visits, and two of those - both reviews - are well over the five-hundred-visit mark. And no, that doesn't, mean it's time to start advertising (this is more out of laziness then any kind of high-mindedness, I'm sure).

 

Extra-curricular activities

Regular visitors to this blog will probably be aware that I’m a fan of the Charles S. Roberts Awards. Actually, I’m a fan of wargame awards in general – they highlight and celebrate good design and production, and prompt discussion among gamers. They have the potential to raise awareness of wargames outside the confines of our sometimes clique-y groups and fora, and they can shine a light on obscured gems that deserve more attention.

In recent years there’s been a school of thought within our broad church questioning the need or validity of wargame awards. I spend way too much time thinking about stuff like this, and I began to wonder how wargame publishers felt about the awards they vie for or get overlooked by. So, I sent a short questionnaire out to a bunch of companies and a subset of those wrote back. You can read about the whole ordeal and the results here (and if 5,000+ words is too much to face, you can get an executive summary here but it’s worth scanning through for the quotes). I am still astounded by the number of companies that wrote back to me (I’m not that big a deal). Pulling the data together, interrogating it and parsing some findings out of it took longer than I expected and impacted on my blog post output, but overall is was a lot of fun and I got to correspond with some interesting people, and I'm pretty happy with how it came out.

I haven’t been doing any more playtesting since With the Hammer (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2025), and I’m okay with that. I’m a much better proofer/editor; I don’t possess the “let’s break this thing” gene necessary for useful playtesting. I would like to do some further scenario development for Afrika Army Korps (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2025). I’m proud of what I helped put together for the game release and I wanted to do more but ran out of time. Again, this relies on time and energy, both of which are finite resources, but I’ll post them on BGG as they’re done, and, of course, mention them here.

 

What’s next

At this stage I don’t have any big plans for A Fast Game between now and the end of the year. I’d like to finish my declared Ten Wargame Challenge, even though the exercise feels a little pointless now, after the implosion of The War Room (I was never really in it for the prizes; A Fast Game originally started out of a misunderstanding about the Ten Wargame Challenge, which I’ve talked about before, but this was the first time I participated in the real thing). I may try to come up with something for next year, or try again if somebody decides to declare a wargame challenge like the War Room folks had done. 

I have a couple of ideas for pieces I’d like to write. I’m sketching out another two or maybe three posts of different aspects of block wargames (the Not Created Equal posts); you would have seen another one by now had I not got tunnel vision with the Value Proposition survey piece. I’m also thinking about a series of really narrow-focus interview pieces with people with more expertise than me. Like the Survey report, these will probably just follow my own obsessions, but they may be of interest to others. Time will tell. I also want to write more reviews, but this means I need to play new games - or revisit old favourites - more than once or twice.

I’m also going to try to get myself some more table time. When I have the opportunity to play a game, even a short one, I’ve been doing something else instead, and that hasn’t always been something that needs to be done right then. T and I have missed a lot of weeks for our Monday night games, and rather pull out a solitaire game instead, I’ve been either writing, reading, or (less productively) catching up on YouTube videos. Hell, even my wife has been telling me to play a short game for myself when I have a free night. I suspect, for all my good intentions, I still won’t get as many games out as I’ perhaps should, but I’m going to try to be more mindful of the option.

Thanks for reading this far. If you think I'm doing something right or wrong, please leave a comment. And if there's something you'd like to see on A Fast Game, or something you think would be worth the time to research, get in touch (comment or email).

 

 

TL/DR: The Value Proposition of Wargaming Awards for Publishers

 

 

Reaching a targeted audience.

 

I posted my first article a couple of days ago, based on a survey of wargame publishers to see what they collectively thought about wargame honours like the Charles S. Roberts Awards. The truth is, not that many folks read long posts about subjects that will probably only interest a few people. I think what's there is worthwhile, but I get that everyone is busy, and there's probably something much more interesting on YouTube right now...

The full article comes out to just over 5,300 words and it's a little self-indulgent. This is a “just the facts, ma’am” distillation of the results from the analysis, so you can skip the full piece but still act like you read it at parties.

How this came about:

•   I was curious about how publishers viewed wargame awards, so I wrote to fifty-four wargame publishers with a short list of questions.

•   Remarkably, twenty-four of those companies (around a 42%) wrote back.

•   The full article is an admittedly fairly shallow analysis of the replies. I promised anonymity to respondents unless they gave permission to use their comments with attribution, and several specifically asked for complete anonymity, while some were willing to “go on the record.”

The respondents

•  The respondents were asked to describe their company in terms of size (relative to the industry).

•  Twenty respondents self-identified as “small,” three as “medium,” and just one company maintained they were “large.”

•  Most respondents explained their size in terms of staff numbers rather than output or some other measure.

The findings

•  Seventy-five percent of respondents had a broadly positive view of wargame awards generally. The reasons for this ranged from peer or market acknowledgement of exemplary design to recognition (in lieu of financial reward) for individual designers, to raising a publisher’s market presence (free advertising).

•  While the majority of respondents held a generally favourable view of wargame awards, of the concept of wargame awards, 16.7% reported that they thought that various aspects of the process could be improved upon or made more transparent, particularly the selection process for popular or open-voting  awards.

•  Twenty-five percent of respondents were ambivalent about awards in wargaming. The views expressed had a live-and-let-live tone; nobody was calling for the overthrow of the ruling class.

•  Award nominations and even award wins rarely equate to an increase in sales, and when they do it is almost always negligible, a bump rather than a spike.

•  Only one case was reported across the responses of a significant jump in sales being associated with an award win (if you want to know who it was, you’ll have the section of the article sub-headed Award win).

I would like once again to thank all the publishers who shared their time and thoughts when they were under no obligations to do so. The work is neither conclusive nor exhaustive, but it’s a start; if there is enough interest, I may revisit the subject in a couple of years.

 

 

State of Play: Breizh 1341

 

 

 

This was our first outing with Breizh 1341 (Shakos, 2022).  I’d read some good things about Breizh, but I didn’t know what to expect. We have been leaning into shorter games of late, and this certainly fit the bill.

(Contextual note: we played Breizh for the first time the same day I put up the unboxing post. I was keen to try it out, and ran through the rulebook just the once before setting up (I refer you to the last section of the AAR).)

Partial starting set-up; the players each start with a Castle, The French player begins the
game with two Partisans, one each in Trégor and Saint-Brieuc, while the English player
 (as the aggressor) starts with one Partisan and two Troops in his home province of
Nantes (not pictured here, but the partisans are the little cylinder pieces and the
Troops the cubes; these will be familiar to anyone who has played a game from
Shakos' Conquerors series).

The box is small, about 9” by 7” and about 2” deep. It needs to be that deep to accommodate all the cards and wooden components and the little four panel A3-sized mounted map. I don’t want to dwell too much on the components – you can have a look at my unboxing post for that – But I have to reiterate just how gorgeous the whole package is. The map is rendered in muted tones that make the bright red and royal blue pieces pop. The cardboard markers for castle and area control are also quite nice, and a good size for manipulating during play. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

As is our tradition of long standing, T played the French and I took the English. Breizh runs on its cards. There are three decks of Event cards, two decks of Character cards, one each for the two sides, and one small deck of Special Event cards. Each deck has its place and purpose, which we’ll unravel as I describe the game.

Breizh 1341 is based on the War of Breton Succession, a local conflict that knotted a few threads in the greater tapestry of the Hundred Years’ War. To win the game you must gain control of eight areas that comprise the Breton peninsula (which could lead to a sudden death victory before the natural end of the game), or to control of a majority of the areas by the end of the game.

A real-estate boom at the end of turn two, with waterfront properties proving popular.
If you have the troops available, you can conduct sieges at multiple locations with a
single Besiege action. It's not enough to hold the Castles, you also have to have
a Partisan present to exert control over the area. But Castles are cool.

On the face of it, Breizh can seem a little fussy, but it is an elegantly simple game with a surfeit of moving parts. The game is played over six turns, and this is where the genius of the design is revealed; The first and last turns require five cards plays, while the second through fifth end after just three cards per side. There are reasons for this, and along the top and bottom edges of the board are helpful reminders of the card limits, with five card-places marked, the first three in a slightly darker tone.

As mentioned, the Event cards are divided into three decks, appropriately referred to as the First, Second and Third Epoch decks. Then there is the Special Event deck. The first and last turns require the players to play five cards; turns two through five are tighter turns, allowing the play only three cards each. The Event cards can be played either for their event (if the card’s colour corresponds to you team) or for an action – Recruit (place Troops on the board), Rally (place a Partisan), Fight (remove some your opponent’s Troops) or Besiege (use your troops to try to take a Castle).

At the beginning of each turn, starting with the first, each player draws a Character card from their deck (each of these represents a significant individual from the time of the war). These aren’t used as action cards like the Event cards; instead these offer support for one or two actions. They can only be used once, but unused Character cards can be carried over from turn to turn.

One play in to turn two, and too many cards (see Mistakes were made below). We
rectified this after this round. Not the two ermine symbols on the top-left corner of
the left-most card, signifying it as a Second Epoch event. The second card from
the left is a Character card, while the black background card already played is
a Special Event card, The Truce of Bordeaux.

The first turn represents the preparation period of the war, when both sides sought a victory in the courts so as to not have to resort to war, the whole time shoring up support among the old families of Brittany and further afield. The number of cards you receive in each subsequent turn is informed by the number of areas you control at the end of the current turn, so establishing a real estate portfolio is the key requirement.

In the first turn, each player draws a Character card, then the First Epoch events are dealt to the player in the deck’s entirety. Montfort (English) has the initiative in turn 1 and go first. At the end of the turn, the remaining First Epoch Event cards are collected and shuffled into the Second Epoch deck to make up the deck for the next four turns. At the end of each turn, any unused Event cards are collected and huffled back into the deck, ready for the next draw. The number of Event cards drawn is in subsequent turns is one plus a number equivalent to the number of areas under your control, plus a Special Event card (there are only eight of these, so they will all come out through the course of the game). Both players will have at least enough cards to play a middle turns; if you only have two Event cards in your hand at the beginning of the turn, you may have already lost the game.

The French player, having ejected the English Partisan from Léon, lays siege to
St-Pol-de-Léon, and to Carhaix in Cornouaille for good measure. The number
superimposed on each Castle is its defensive value.

As mentioned, in each of the middle turns, the players each draw a Special Event card, The events in these cards mostly reflect things that happened in the greater European sphere, outside of Brittany, but had significant influence on the local conflict, such as the Truces of Calais and Bordeaux, and the Black Death. These cards must be played in the round they are drawn (though they can be used for an Action rather than their event (see below)). This further restricts the number of camp-friendly Events you can play in these middle turns to two, making each decision-point that much more crucial. Breizh is a game you simply can’t play turn to turn, which, with our first try, was exactly what we ended up doing. Both our games would have benefited from some strategic focus. (We still had fun with it though – we never go into a “learning’’ game too seriously).

The final turn represents the culmination of all your planning (or highlights your lack thereof), and as such, offers the same freedom of action as the first turn, but with one difference; the deck is prepared as in previous turns, but the Third Epoch deck is shuffled, then placed on top of the draw deck, so that the Third Epoch Events (of which there are just six) guaranteeing their availability in the final round.

Our game came down to the final round, but I’d managed to maintain an edge in area control. With his last card, Raoul of Caours, T took an English partisan out of Nantes, robbing me of control of that province (a vindictive move, as Nantes was my home territory), but it was too little, too late. I still controlled five areas to his one. It didn’t feel like a true victory because it was a learning game, but I’m confident of handing T his hat when next we return to the game.

 

Mistakes were made

Well, just a couple of mistakes. In our first game, I had misread the rather clearly stated instruction regarding relinquishing all Event cards in each player’s hand at the end of the turn, then shuffling these unplayed First Epoch Event cards into the Second Epoch deck to create the deck for turns two through five. The second turn was played with cumbersome hands; no real harm, except that it was counter to the intent of the rules. And awkward. This was rectified for the third turn and thereafter.

The end-state of our first game. A bit of a trouncing for the French,
but they'll be back, I'm sure.

The other thing was a misunderstanding early on about what constituted control of an area. We (well, I) went into the game thinking it was all about the Castles, where in fact you can only claim an area when you both possess a Castle and have a Partisan active in that area (if both have a claim, control goes to whoever has the most Partisans, then who has the most Castles; if it’s even-stevens, nobody can claim control of the area). We sorted this out going into the third turn as well.

Okay, there was one other thing I didn’t pick up on until the game was over. We both played all of the Special Events for the Event, which probably hobbled us evenly for the most part, when we could have used them for an action. I did get a small advantage playing the Black Death event which requires the removal of half (rounding up) of each players Troops and Partisans. T had a lot more Troops on the map, and an odd number of Partisans (he was dangerously close to taking an unassailable lead), so the plague hurt me, but it hurt him more.

-----

So, that’s Breizh 1341. I can’t wait to try this out again. It’s such a neat little game, rich in the history of an event I knew next to nothing about. Every choice feels consequential; this feels like a much bigger game than the footprint would suggest.

Feature: The Value Proposition of Wargaming Awards - the Publishers' Perspective

 

A crown had gathered, eager to hear the results of the survey.

 

Introduction: where did this come from?

This inquiry sprang from a misguided notion I’ve been carrying around since I was a teenager; that the recognition of games via awards translated to an increase in interest – and by extension, sales – in games generally. Around the time I began to get into wargaming, in my early teens – this was the late seventies and early eighties – the Academy Awards for Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were a big thing, or at least taken more seriously than they seem to be nowadays. A film that won the Best Picture Oscar would see a huge surge in cinema attendance as more people went to the cinema to see it, or to see it again. Sometimes it would even warrant a theatre re-release so all the people who missed it the first time could go see what the fuss was about.

You see the same dynamics in publishing. Arundhati Roy’s debut novel, The God of Small Things, was slated for a paperback print run of around 5,000 copies after a hardcover release of about a thousand. When The God of Small Things was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize, the publisher upped the initial paperback print run to 160,000 copies on the strength of the nomination.

When I read about awards like the Origins Awards in wargame magazines, I naturally conflated this recognition with greater commercial success; it developed into an article of faith and for a long time I never stopped to question it. Maybe back then, in those heady days before the gift of the Internet – and its pharmakon, Internet anonymity – things did work out this way.

For me the moment of questioning came half-way through writing a post about what I thought was the true value proposition for publishers receiving a nomination for an award with reasonably high visibility in an admittedly small demographic, in reply to an actual publisher venting that their nomination didn’t translate to any real value at all. It was a profound example of Dunning-Krueger exposition, and I considered just deleting the post as I thought about it (it’s still embarrassing, but in the interests of intellectual honesty, it remains up). In short, this inquiry was born out of personal interest; I set out to find out what publishers’ experience was with awards to satisfy my own curiosity, and I’ve written up what I found to justify the efforts of everyone involved.

 

Scope and methodology

I’m not a trained statistician, but I’m something of a data wonk and have picked up some basics in various work roles over time. I wanted to apply some intellectual rigour to the project, and I wanted to write it up, if only out of respect for the respondents (and, of course, for more and interesting blog content).

For the survey to produce results I could call representative, I needed a largish pool of potential participants. These would be companies which released wargames either exclusively or in a sufficiently high number of titles (50-80% of total output) The obvious choice was recipients of Charles S. Roberts nominations. Over the last five years of the awards, the categories have been pretty stable, so I kept my query pool to recipients from those five award rounds. I looked only at the categories awarded to games, not game designers or illustrators. I also left out nominees for the Science Fiction or Fantasy category, as the companies represented for this award were either more mainstream companies who happened to stumble into a wargame nomination, or had already been represented in other categories.

I identified 61 publishers from the historical game-awarded categories. I already had a conversant relationship with a couple of the publishers on the list, so I contacted them first; the others I essentially cold-called (via email, or in a couple of cases, a direct message via Facebook), with a form letter comprised of four questions and an opportunity to provide further comments. I spent about three weeks contacting – and in a few cases corresponding with – publishers, but the essential message was consistent for all. It read as follows:

 

Wargame awards value-proposition survey

 

[Greeting],

I post a small blog about wargames and wargaming, and I want to write a piece about the perceived and actual effects that award nominations or wins have on sales of the nominated titles, that an award (or nomination) automatically translates to increased interest and/or sales, or a general increase in brand recognition. I’m hoping to get a clearer picture of this with your help. I'm writing to every publisher that has been nominated for a Charles S. Roberts Award in the last five years, along with some others I'm aware of receiving nominations for other awards.

I’m writing to wargame publishers in the hopes that enough will respond to make a useful sample group, asking a few general questions about their experience regarding awards. I’m not asking for hard figures or percentages, or information that might be considered commercial in confidence; only general responses to the following questions based on your company’s experience.

I have prepared four questions (three only requiring single-word answers) and an invitation to add any further comments. The answers to questions 2, 3 and 4 will be used for a simple statistical analysis. Please feel free to be as general or specific in your comments as you wish, and you’re welcome to add a statement or any further comments (anonymity will be assumed unless permission is explicitly granted).

1. As a wargame publisher, what do you see as the value proposition for awards like the Charles S. Roberts Awards or the SDHistCon Summit Award?

 2. Have you seen an increase in interest or orders of titles that have received a nomination or nominations, but failed to win an award (ball-park only – negligible / noticeable / profound)?

3. Have you seen an increase in interest or orders of titles that have won an award? If so, would you consider this a significant increase (as above)?

4. Would you class your company as small, medium or large (in terms of wargame publishers, not compared to IBM)?

5. Do you wish to add further comments (if so, please indicate if these may be attributed)?

Thank you for reading this far. I will inform the survey participants ahead of the post being published and will provide a pre-publication draft on request.

Regards,

Jonathon Dyer

https://fastgame-goodgame.blogspot.com/

-------

I intentionally kept the questions simple and straight-forward. I figured anyone who chose reply was taking time away from something more important to do so, and so I kept three of the questions to single word answers, leaving open the opportunity for the respondents to expand their answers as they saw fit.

Of the sixty-one companies I attempted to contact, one had since gone out of business. Two more proved impossible to reach (due to technical issues with their website-based messaging apps – I did try several times in each case, but without success). I believe I likely managed to contact a human at each of the other fifty-seven companies from the complete list.

 

Response

From my admittedly limited experience with surveys from working in libraries, I hoped for around a 12-15% response rate, but I was sure I’d be lucky to get much more than 6-7%; cold-call surveys rarely get above this level of participation. If I didn’t make 5% (four or five results), I had a contingency plan of expanding the pool to European award nominees. I bullied a couple of publishers with whom I already had some contact into helping out, but most were formal approaches via email. Or in a couple of cases, via Facebook Messenger.

As mentioned, I couldn’t reach everyone on the list, but I have worked on the assumption that I managed to reach all fifty-seven of the other publishers over the course of about two weeks. I’m pleased – and more than a little surprised – to report that twenty-four publishers responded to the survey, a response rate of roughly 42% of those contacted. This was a much better return than I had any cause to hope for, and I’m grateful to everyone who took the time to respond.

The geographical breakdown of the respondents shows a truly international response to the questionnaire, which is heartening. By nationality, the biggest non-US response was from Italy, with France and the United Kingdom tied for second place.

Some respondents answered perfunctorily, which is fine; I really didn’t expect any more than that (the opportunity for comments was optional), and their contribution is appreciated. Some added comments under request of anonymity, or of not having their comments presented at all, which I respect; this really is a small community, after all. A handful of respondents were happy to be quoted, and each of these made insightful comments; my especial gratitude goes to them.

 

Results

What follows is an overall analysis at all of the response material received with little extrapolation. I have tried to keep this reading as objective as I can. The material is presented in a different order to how the questions were presented in the questionnaire.

I wanted to look at the self-reported size of the respondents first, because I think this has had an influence on the subsequent data collected. The data collected from the remaining questions are presented in the order as appeared in the questionnaire. The responses to the value, or perceived value, of wargame awards generally from the publishers’ point of view have been distilled into shared themes. Every publisher has their own distinct take on the value of awards, but these are often more similarities than differences at play.

Questions 2 and 3 are inextricably linked; there are nearly an order of magnitude more award nominees than award winners, but I thought it would be worthwhile to see if a game taking a gong would have any further effect that just a nomination. Only ten of the twenty-four responding publishers had won an award of any stripe.

I’ve tried to avoid reading too much into the data beyond neutral observations, and where possible I have let the respondents speak for themselves. I will not be releasing the names of the respondents a list of the respondents; several requested anonymity, and added to this, it would be easy enough to reverse-engineer a list of companies that, for whatever reason, chose not to respond to the survey. I have liberally quoted from the companies that agreed to go on the record to add some nuance to the findings.

Company size

 “I’d class us as a small publisher, and I’d guess that’s the case for most of the wargame industry, with just a few exceptions. It’s a niche market, and even the more well-known names tend to operate on a relatively modest scale compared to broader segments of the gaming world.”

- David Heath, Lock ‘N Load Publishing

 

I guess we're medium. Small would be 1-2 people. Counting all the freelancers' time, we must be around 2-3 full time jobs for wargames.

- Florent Coupeau, NUTS! Publishing

 

Small – we fit in a garage. 8-)

- Steve Rawling, LPS Inc. (Against the Odds magazine)

 

The wargame industry is small, even in the context of the broader hobby gaming sector it’s a thin slice from the pie-chart of overall game production. I think an argument could be made that there are three or maybe four “large” companies operating significantly in the hex-and-counter gaming space located in the United States, arguably another one or two in Europe – though that might require some renegotiation of what constitutes a wargame, which is definitely not what I’m here to discuss – and at least two more in Asia.  None of these are large companies in comparison to other industries, or even companies in the broader game publication sphere. The publishers we think of as industry flagships are still tiny compared to the likes of Hasbro, Asmodee, or Games Workshop.

The question of company size was the last question on the survey, but I wanted to address it first because it has some bearing on the responses to the other questions. I made the question simple to answer with just three single-word options, but I didn’t want to dictate guidelines for what should constitute a small, medium of large company; I was interested to see. A small company might release a new game every other year, or they might produce one or two a month, along with reprints of previous games. I was more interested in learning how publishers see themselves within the ecology of wargame publishing.

Respondents were encouraged to use a peer-comparison in identifying their size, measuring themselves against other wargame publishers inside of the ecosystem. I think inside the industry there is some cache in representing yourself as a small publisher, like a band that doesn’t want to appear that they have “sold out.” That’s not meant to be any kind of indictment; it’s merely an observation, though it has some baring on some of the data. It would be interesting to dig into more deeply in a future study, but it’s not what we’re concerned with here.

 

NES releases one game every 6 to 8 years, but recently that has increased to one every 3 years. However, every game that has been released has gotten nominated for something in the CSR Awards.

- Mark Hinkle, New England Simulations

 

Nearly all the respondents declared theirs to be a small company. Most of these were one- or two-person operations, but the count included at least two companies that, if asked, I would have positioned as medium. Uwe Walentin described Sound of Drums as, “Small, but on the verge to medium.”

Three publishers defined themselves as medium-sized operations, though their reasons varied. One publisher placed their company in the medium bracket on the basis of their larger-than-average initial print runs, in spite of fielding a very small staff. One respondent wrote, “In wargame terms, you are either [one company was mentioned here], more than one employee (medium) or one employee or fraction (small).” Only one anonymous respondent described themselves as a “large” publisher, “in the top 2-3 in the USA if not the world.”

 

The value propositon

A general once asked Napoleon what was the purpose of awarding petty baubles like the Legion of Honor to the troops and Napoleon replied, “It is with baubles that men are led.” The principle is true today, the awards give everyone involved something to shoot for and in a world of inadequate monetary compensation for oftimes heroic efforts, a bit of psychic satisfaction for the winners.

- Steve Rawling

 

“Regarding awards […] in general, the value proposition is like that of a medal of honor: it may give you or your company some gratifications from single persons or associations, but it doesn't help you to fight better.”

- Nicola Contardi, Europa Simulazioni

 

As a wargame publisher, it is a very useful catchphrase on the front or back of a box.

- Yasushi Nakaguro, Bonsai Games

 

The first question on the list was the most open-ended because I wanted to let the respondents answer as freely as they felt comfortable. I didn’t expect many respondents to go into too much detail with this one, but I wanted to get a measure of publishers’ expectations of what wargame awards mean to their businesses. This freedom resulted in several respondents requesting anonymity. Here I’ll present a synthesis of the results to highlight the themes shared among the responses. I’ll also include quotes from some respondents (with their permission) to add context.

Wargame awards are generally well-regarded by wargame publishers. Some of the respondents suggested there may be better ways to govern the nomination process or some other aspect of various awards (you can’t please all of the punters all of the time), but nearly everyone saw something positive in having wargame awards, if only for others.

The majority of respondents expressed a generally positive view of wargame awards. Three quarters of respondents expressed a positive opinion of wargame awards in general or the Charles S. Roberts Awards in particular. This doesn’t equate to a tangible benefit to the publisher in all cases. Of those who expressed a positive view, 16.6% emphasised the recognition of their designers rather than any value for the company. Another 54.2% of respondents saw award recognition as a positive in terms of marketing, either passively – game or brand awareness-raising – or as a chance to capitalise on that recognition boost through their own marketing (respondents were split roughly fifty/fifty, with a couple highlighting both).

 

It's a great way to highlight good wargames to the public. It is so hard to break through these days so every new opportunity is very valuable. 

- Petter Schanke Olsen, Tompet Games

“The value proposition is for industry recognition and establishing brand awareness for excellence.  While, as I will note below, we do not see significant uptick in sales of the title, we do believe it makes customers more likely to buy or back our games in the future.”

- Kevin Bertram, Fort Circle Games

 

“Awards and nominations have had no discernible impact on our sales or notoriety. I think this is more a result of our size/niche; I'm sure other publishers see an impact. But it's nice to have the work recognized by one's peers and public, especially because we are off in our own corner.”

- Amabel Holland, Hollanspiele

 

Fully a quarter of respondents took a less charitable view of awards, in terms of benefits. This presented more as ambivalence to awards rather than active rejection, but 3:1 ratio among the respondents surprised me. I don’t have any figures to back this up, but it feels like a reflection of the “do we even need awards” sentiments that circulate in online fora and are debated on YouTube channels around the time of the CSR nominations announcement each year for the last few, though 25% seems higher than I would have expected.

I hadn’t thought about this being so prevalent a view among publishers, otherwise I would have built another question into the query letter. I suspect that this may be an artifact of the still relatively small collection sample. It’s a subject that perhaps should be discussed, but while it warranted noting, it’s not the concern of this study.

 

Being an independent company, the impact is minimal. Mainstream brands always attract more attention than we do, regardless of how the products compare. 

- Carlo Amaddeo, WBS Games

 

I should add that none of the comments were hostile to the idea of wargame awards or to the CSR or Summit Awards that were singled out as examples in the questionnaire. Four respondents made further comments questioning the architecture of the nomination selection system but these comments all came from publishers who had been favourable of the awards generally.

Nicola Contardi from Europa Simulatzioni questioned the opacity of the process: “Value proposition would benefit from an increase of transparency in the overall process of assigning awards. What are the criteria by which a game is entered a short list? Who are the persons assigning the awards and why? What is the process granting that the best title wins the award?” Mr Contradi was ultimately positive regarding the award process, adding, “While my comments above may seem sort of a negative criticism, I think that a solid system, with transparent and shared rules to assign awards to wargames in the international market, would be very important for our community. I thank you for the work you do, and I encourage all of you to make it always better.”

The awards do provide a platform for discussion of games which is always good for   the industry. While I am biased as a small company, the award winning is for the most  part reserved for the large companies though the nominations are appreciated by   us smaller guys. 

- [Anonymous] 

 

Award nomination

As previously stated, all the companies I approached had been nominated at least once in the last five years for a CSR Award, so all respondents were qualified speak to whether the nomination of an award – in their cases a fairly well-known and well-covered one – had any influence on subsequent sales of the nominated title.

In regard to my original question, whether awards nominations translate to (even moderately) increased sales, the overwhelming majority of respondents said it hadn’t. Several said “Nil” or “None” in their comments. This wasn’t an option I’d thought to add in the questionnaire, so I combined the results of respondents had identified a slight (negligible) or noticeable because these seemed to be virtually interchangeable in many of the responses. From parsing these responses, it seems like most publishers have experienced some increase in interest or sales of a nominated product, but that the increase is of an order not much more than what could be a statistical margin of error. No publisher indicated a significant increase in sales.

Which brings us to the fourth category. I dubbed this “It’s complicated” partly because it amused me to do so, but also because it succinctly captures a recurring frustration among the respondents. Based on the evidence reported, the biggest complication preventing a potential bounce in sales of award nominated games is timing. The pattern of production for the majority of publishers – those who don’t use print-on-demand partners like Blue Panther – often produce quite limited numbers of games in a single print-run, sometimes as few as a few hundred copies. A number of companies have some manner of pre-order system in place that can inform the scale of production, but the wargame publishing business is still a business, and nobody wants to be left with a lot of excess stock. This leads to popular games – the games that might garner an award nomination – often being sold out by the time the nominations are announced. In the case of the Charles S. Roberts Awards, where the awards cover games released in the previous calendar year, but the selection panel does not meet until three or four months into the following year, the list of nominated games could appear twelve months or more after the initial release of a title*, plenty of time for initial stocks to have been depleted.

One respondent, Sergio Schiavi of Dissimula Edizioni, wrote at length about his experience with awards. I believe it warrants inclusion here in full:

Well, my only experience is with a title I published a few years ago, From Salerno to Rome [Dissimula Edizioni, 2020]; it did receive a nomination, but by then I had sold most of the copies I'd produced in the game's three print runs, about 1,600 copies in total. For several years, I've been asking people who want to pre-order a game or get information about a title how they found out about it; most of the responses, especially on FSTR, are because they saw a video on YouTube or were talking about it in forums; no one ever mentions the awards to me. But I don't know if it's a significant sample, there were about 20-25 responses of this type in four years.

My first title, Radetzky's March [Dissimula Edizioni, 2018], won an award in France for best game of 2019; even then, it had no impact on sales of the first edition, as all copies sold out well before the award. I don't know if it had any impact on the second edition [Dissimula Edizioni, 2023], which I produced five years later.

A leitmotif among respondents from both the positive and ambivalent camps was the assumption that larger game companies would enjoy an outsized advantage from award nominations compared to the negligible impact, if any, for smaller publishers. This was an opinion offered by a full quarter of the survey respondents, and all of these were self-identified small publishers. I’m grateful for how many companies did respond to my query email, but this is where a larger dataset would have been useful.

 

Award win

The majority of respondents hadn’t won an award, or at least hadn’t won a Charlie**; using CSR nominees as a research pool had the unintended effect of focussing the many of the respondents’ comments on those particular awards rather than wargame awards in general, I don’t have a clear idea of what other wargame awards are being bestowed these days (if anyone would like to highlight an regularly offered award from their region or country, please contact me). Of those publishers whose nominated game had taken a gong, nearly all said that the award still translated to a negligible lift in sales, roughly equivalent to if they had only received a nomination. Some publishers were quick to point out that this was in all likelihood a problem of timing (as discussed above) rather than lack of influence.

There is also the problem for companies outside the United States of actually having their product available in what is seen as the largest market for wargames. Florent Coupeau of NUTS! Publishing wrote:

[The] Charles S. Roberts Awards or the SDHistCon Summit Award; the votes mainly come from US players. Same for BGG awards. No problem with that, they were created by US organizations. But that obviously influences the final results. Now that is democracy, there are more US wargamers anyway :-)

But even though the board members include more and more non-US games in the final round, the US players don't get access to these games as easily as US games. So, they don't know what they are and cannot evaluate them. Thus they don't vote for them. Fairly understandable.

Only one respondent advised an award win had translated to an identifiable increase in sales. Walter Vejdovsky, founder of Fellowship of Simulations, had already established himself as a game designer with his Eagles of France series, released through Hexasim. Mr Vejdovsky launched his own company, Fellowship of Simulations with the release of Verdun,1916: Steel Inferno (Fellowship of Simulations, 2020). The game was nominated for and won three Charles S. Roberts Awards for 2020, including Wargame of the Year and the James Dunnigan Award for Design Excellence. Mr Vejdovsky wrote, “CSR awards were really useful when I won the best wargame of the year awards in 2020 for my first published game. a great support for recognition of a small publisher.”

 

Conclusions

I don’t think anybody in or adjacent to the industry would be surprised by anything brought out in this post. Awards aren’t like house magazines, they are not in the service of a single publisher. Awards are given as recognition for some kind of achievement from the vantage of an audience, usually the customers.

It warrants noting that the European publishers (and the one Japanese respondent) were generally more willing to speak openly in their comments than their US counterparts. I don’t want to try to read too much into this; it may be reflective of different countries’ business cultures generally.

Looking back on the project, I think the topic would have been better served if I’d broadened the pool to include publishers outside of the fairly reductive CSR Awards nominee group. I chose this group so I only had around sixty companies, instead of the 100 or more it may have potentially grown to if I’d expanded my starting pool. Reaching out to a broader base of publishers would have given those who haven’t ever been nominated for an award or have received a nomination of something other than a CSR, to express their ideas of that awards represent to publishers. It would be easy enough to direct those who hadn’t had a nomination to skip to Question X. Also, I think if I were to do this again, I’d look at using an online survey option like Survey Monkey, although I’m really not sure if that would translate to a bigger response pool.

The results are a little skewed in the response; while I received responses from many more publishers than I dared hope, most of these were from smaller outfits, many of whom have never won an award in spite of, in some cases, repeated nominations over several years. This is probably roughly proportionate to the production landscape in wargaming; for most indy publishers it’s a cottage industry that many run in their spare time while working a straight job. I don’t want to speculate on why companies with a larger industry footprint tended not to reply (except to say that answering dumb questions from someone with no established credibility in the wargaming landscape is probably a waste of time), but I suspect two or three responses from the “other end of the industry may have made for more interesting reading.

 

Final thoughts

I’m not a publisher, so I can only go by the information presented here and conversations with people involved in the industry. That’s why I wanted to run this survey and try to parse some meaning out of the results. I’m under no illusions that this will be on any use to anyone, but it may ignite a conversation somewhere.

As a consumer, the value for me in awards like the Charlies is awareness-raising. Each year there is at least one game that I hadn’t heard of, often released by a publisher of which I wasn’t aware. And in nearly every case, that game is a nominee, not a winner.

To be fair, I’m not contributing to any bump in sales, negligible or otherwise; usually I won’t get to purchasing a game I hear about through an awards nomination because I operate on a fairly tight budget, usually allocated four or five months in advance, and I put the same amount of research into an award-nominated game as I would any other, but I think I’ve eventually bought at least one game – often two – from those nominated in the CSRs from the last five or six years that otherwise may have passed me by.

I’ve written in the past about how important I believe it is to recognise the creators of the games we enjoy and how grateful I am for the continued existence the CSR Awards in particular. I feel like I need to reiterate that this exercise was born out of personal curiosity regarding the impact these awards have – or don’t have – on the business-end of the hobby. I’d gone into this project (nearly three months in the making – I started mailing out questionnaires in early July) hoped to get better news about the effect a game’s sales prospects of a nomination for a high-profile award, but the evidence says otherwise.

In spite of this, the majority of publishers still think positively of wargame awards and support their continuance. They’re not uncritical of the way the sausages are made, but they still enjoy the grill.

The final word should go to Kevin Zucker of Operational Studies Group. Mr Zucker – like several others – was generous with his time and comments, indulging all of my follow-up questions. He closed this: “There is no direct correlation, although it is never a bad thing to win an award. The real award is people playing and having fun.”

As I added these comments to my spreadsheet, a follow up message arrived: 

“The ultimate award is a game map in tatters and the ink worn off the Napoleon counter...”

 

* This isn’t meant as a criticism of the structure or management of the CSRs. It’s simply recognising that no matter how a sample period is structured, it is probably going to affect somebody adversely. This is unfortunate, but there is simply no way to create a perfectly fair system. To paraphrase Churchill, it’s the worst system, barring all the other ones.

** Of the twenty-four respondents, eight publishers had won at least one CSR Award in the last five years.

Appendix 1: Charles S. Roberts Award nomination and award distribution over the last five years (2020-2024).