Obligatory introductory post

It’s suddenly 2023 and I’m wondering where the time has gone. But I’m getting ahead of myself. My name is Jonathon. I’ve been a wargamer since… well, let’s just say, it’s been a long time now. Not as long as some, but a while all the same.

My first wargame was Titan Strike (No. 3 in SPI’s Capsule Game series, 1979) which was a lot of fun – I was a sci-fi nerd – but left me unfulfilled. I soon graduated to a second-hand copy of Modern Battles II (SPI, 1977); all four maps covered (really well) in clear Contact and the whole thing rolled up in a tube with the rules and counters. I had to provide my own dice, which wasn’t as easy then as it is now (I was fourteen and broke). These were followed by Strategy & Tactics and Ares Magazines with their incumbent games, starting with Barbarian Kings (Ares No. 3, SPI; even as a teenager I exhibited pronounced brand loyalty). Around the same time my friends and I discovered RPGs, and so began my lifelong devotion to Traveller, but I always found time for both.

I hit something of a gaming drought generally in my twenties, moving states twice in four years, earning a degree, getting married and the host of other things that life throws at a person when they’re just trying to make their way in the world. Eventually things settled down, and slowly I came back to both RPGs and wargaming, as well as general family gaming (my wife’s family have always been big on games; not the types of games I was used to, but a step up from Monopoly.

About fifteen years ago I joined up with a group of like-minded souls for a weekly game. This started off as almost purely role-playing, but has developed into a shared space for RPGs and boardgames. I’m also lucky enough to have a near-weekly game with my brother-in-law, Toby. This started while my wife was in hospital for several months, as a kind gesture to cheer me up a little and make sure I got a home-cooked meal once in a while, but has kept going since. For the first six or seven years, Toby and I played Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT, 2010) almost exclusively. We’ve both got quite good at it and are a good match, both in skill and temperament; a win is always an accomplishment, a loss an opportunity to congratulate the victor and plot revenge. More recently we’ve (I’ve) tried to mix it up a little, mostly with other flavours of C&C. Occasionally, I’ll even sneak in something like Time of Crisis (GMT, 2017) or a game from Worthington’s Blue and Gray Campaign series (Worthington Publishing, 2016).

Like a lot of folks in our hobby, I own a lot more games than I’ve actually played. I’ve managed to get some to the table at least once, some maybe a half-dozen times, but the majority (around 70% – I made a spreadsheet) I haven’t played one single time. Not even a two-handed learning game. This is something I’ve become acutely aware of in the last eighteen or so months. We live in a smallish apartment, and storage space is a premium. I used to buy games on a notional “I’ll get to this one when I retire” basis. Well, I’m in the semi-retired or pre-retirement or some such stage of my life, and those games are starting to haunt my waking hours. It’s actually beginning to feel unethical to have shelves of games I’ve bought, unboxed, fawned over and read through the rules of but never actually got to the table.

So, it’s suddenly 2023, and I’m wondering about a lot of things, actually. I tried to distract myself one day from thinking too much by opening Facebook. I noticed a few people in various gaming groups – from the Boardgame Geek group to hard-core wargaming outfits – proudly presenting their 10×10 lists. They all wrote like this was the most natural thing in the world and so everyone must know what they were talking about, so – former librarian – I did some digging. I realised that these were my people, folks that owned more games than they’d played, felt guilty about it*, and so they’d selected ten games out of their existing collections, with the intention of playing them ten times each, over the course of the calendar year, and were announcing this to their peers so they would be held accountable for this declaration of intent.

This is something I could do, I thought. So, in a burst of enthusiasm I started to put together a list. I soon realised I wouldn’t be able to make ten runs at ten different games in the space of a year; there just wouldn’t be enough year. I could, I thought, maybe do six games six times each. That, I thought might b doable. I looked through my collection, made a list, and posted it on Facebook in a group devoted to geographically local gamers. I was excited. I was elated.

Then I looked at the list again, and I thought to myself, What was I thinking?

I picked six wargames (it being a wargame group, and for the fact that I enjoy wargames, I own a lot of wargames, and I would like to play more wargames.

My List was as follows (and in historical order):

• This War Without an Enemy (Nuts!, 2020)

• French and Indian War, 1757-1759 (Worthington Publishing, 2020)

• Napoleon 1806 (Shakos, 2017)

• Great War Commander (Hexasim, 2018)

• Churchill (GMT, 2015), and

• Brief Border Wars (Compass Games, 2020)

I also threw in one as an honorary mention of 1960: the Making of the President (GMT, 2007), which isn’t a wargame, but it’s sat on my shelf for too long and I’d like to get a play or two in this year as well. What can I say? I’m catholic in my gaming tastes.

The problem showed itself when I looked at the list again in the cold light of day. Well, the next day. Churchill, but all reports, is a fine game. Some may argue that it doesn’t belong on a list of wargames because it isn’t a wargame. I don’t want to get into that here. My issue is that it’s a three-player game. It’s a struggle for me sometimes to get one more willing player to try a new game. Group game night is always four to five player games. No, Churchill must go. I’m still deciding what to replace it with; I have a lot of two-player contenders. The guidelines I set myself as I was making the list were:

• No doubling-up on publishers or designers (this was hard – I could have easily put together a list of just GMT, or just Worthington, or only Legion games)

• Interesting mechanics or new applications of familiar ones (new to me, at least); and

• Playable in an appropriately brief time. Nearly all my face-to-face games get played on week-nights; two-and-a-half hours is about the outside limit.

So, the blog. I figured if I’m seriously going to pursue this 6×6 thing, I should try to keep a record of it. Also, I make up for not getting to play so many games by thinking a lot about games. So this blog will probably turn into a channel for pointless ruminations about whatever I happen to have been playing or reading lately. The occasional rant might also be on the cards if something particularly grinds my gears that week (don’t ask me for an opinion on the whole WotC catastrophe playing out as I write).

One of the joys of writing a blog is not expecting anyone to actually read it. I’ll try to keep to a schedule of one or two entries a week, but won’t feel too guilt-ridden if I have to skip a week. I’ll try to keep it to wargaming, but sometimes other kinds of games may get an airing. I’ll keep a log of my ludological accomplishments, and around December, if I’ve enjoyed the experience, I might sign up for a second tour. If you’ve read this far, say hello in the comments. And if this seems like your bag, tune in from time to time. It could be fun.

* I may be projecting here.