6x6: Third Quarter Update – the home stretch (or, the fifth stage is Acceptance)

 

 

Analysis paralysis. The struggle is real.

Tempus fugit. We’re already three-quarters through the year, which means it’s time for another quarterly progress report. For those just tuning in, I started this blog as a tool to keep myself honest regarding a gaming commitment I made to myself, to play six games I’d owned for at least a year but hadn’t yet got to the table. This update will look at what I’ve managed to play, what I still have to get played, what changes I’ve made to the list, and what – if anything – I’ve learnt in the process. This is the third quarterly report for they year; the two previous reports can be found at: Report 1 (January-March); and Report 2 (April-June).

I ended the second quarter on a sober but hopeful note. Most of my 6x6 games I end up playing with my brother-in-law, T. He’s a good sport, always happy to try something new, and once he’s grokked a new game, we tend to be fairly evenly matched. We started meeting on Monday nights (sometimes Tuesdays) for a game when my wife was in hospital for a couple of months in late 2010, and we’ve kept it up since.

Sometimes T’s job will take him out of town and we won’t get to game that week, occasionally for two weeks of more. When that happens, I’ll sometimes be able to catch up with B, the host of our Wednesday night game. This doesn’t happen as often as we’d like due to clashing commitments, but we sometimes get to squeeze in an extra session. Anyway, as it has transpired, the Monday – sometimes Tuesday – game is where most of the 6x6 action happens.

Aces of Valor (Legion wargames, 2023).

Initially I chose six games I’d been wanting to play for a while. I had a few ground rules, not to make it more challenging for myself, but to make the experience more meaningful. As I said previously, to start clearing my unplayed list, the games had to be ones that I’d owned for at least a year, and I had to pick games to play against another human being (no solitaire games, not that I had that many when I started this, but it would have felt a bit cheaty not to have a flesh and blood witness to the act). They had to be Wargames or war-adjacent games. I decided not to duplicated publishers or designers, and while I didn’t spell it out, I tried to pick games that seemed to have different approaches or design philosophies. Each game I’d write a short AAR and after the sixth play, I’d write a more in-depth review. The games I settled on at the beginning were (in event-chronological 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)

Good list, I thought. There was a couple of statistical artifacts that showed up when I thought about it more deeply; the games were split evenly between American and French publishers. At least three of the six were block games of one stripe or another (a case could be made – from a purely component-based view – for a fourth with Churchill). Overall, though, I was pretty happy with the line-up.

Within a couple of weeks, the wheels started to come off. Churchill was the sticking point. It’s a three-player game that can be played by two players with the aid of a flowchart bot, but the intent of the designer was for it to be played as a three-player game (like Triumph and Tragedy (GMT Games, 2015), another game that really needs to be experienced with a full complement of players). And it became clear very quickly that it was going to be nearly impossible to corral another two players with any kind of regularity. It's hard enough getting one sometimes.

Undaunted: Normandy (Osprey Games, 2019).

After some deliberation with myself, I settled on Undaunted: Normandy (Osprey Games, 2019). This was a good choice – it was the same period as the game it replaced – but it felt a little cheaty; I had owned it for the appropriate duration, but I’d played Undaunted: North Africa (Osprey Games, 2020) a couple of times (only ever solo, two-handed), and had enjoyed it so much I’d bought Normandy on the strength of that experience, so it wasn’t like I was learning something new from scratch. Still, While the fundamental mechanics were the same, Normandy felt like a very different game in scope, intent and play.

My next line-up problem came more recently when I started to look at This War Without an Enemy, a game that simulates the situation of the English Civil War. Without question, This War would have to be the most beautifully realised game in my collection. The Terry Leeds map is worthy of hanging (I believe Alexander from The Player’s Aid has a poster copy of it hanging in his gaming lair) and the block labels are exquisite. Unfortunately, even the shorter scenarios will push out to three or four hours; the set-up alone for my first test-run took nearly an hour, with checking, re-checking and replacing some blocks for others (the title font is both small and in a lovely but barely legible cursive script). I’m still mad-keen to get my teeth into this game – it promises to be both a destination and a journey – but its requirements prohibit it from 6x6 consideration.

The Barracks Emperors (GMT Games, 2023).

Which brings me to my latest break from the stated guidelines I first set out, but it’s for a good cause. Looking for a replacement for the This War Without an Enemy, I went through my collection, hopeful of a game that stuck roughly to the chronology of the original selection. The best fit was one I had actually played once this year, but had only acquired this year, and that had been published just last year. Fire and Stone: Siege of Vienna, 1683 (Capstone Games, 2022), is an intriguing puzzle of a game. It’s played on a three-by-ten hex-grid, soldiers are represented by a deck of cards, and the only game pieces are wooden cannon and breastworks. While it doesn’t meet the one-year ownership requirement, Fire and Stone more than makes up for this in the area of learning and mastering a completely different kind of game.

I also had an ulterior motive for adding this one. Half-way through the year, the Charles S. Roberts Awards for Excellence in Conflict Simulation for 2022 were announced (a full list of the nominees and winners by category can be found here). The CSR Awards are the wargaming industry’s earliest attempt to highlight and celebrate the best of what your hobby has to offer. I’ve always taken a keen interest in the awards, and I’ve been dismayed by the seeming lack of interest across the hobby. I won’t go into any further detail here – I hope to put something together about awards across the wargaming field sometime soon – but when the CSR Awards were announced, I noticed that out of the roughly five dozen games that were nominated, I already owned about fourteen of them, and had a strong intention to purchase at least a half-dozen more. I’d already reviewed a couple of the games, so I thought one way to highlight the CSRs would be to review every game from the list that I could. I’ve been working through the ones I already owned (at time permits) and have amended the reviews already published with a note at the beginning of the review to declare the game a Charles S. Roberts Award winner or nominee.

Plains Indian Wars (GMT Games, 2022).

It was for this reason that I felt less remorse over the inclusion of Fire and Stone, which received a nomination for Best Gunpowder Wargame. This will be a “two birds / one stone” thing, some conservation of effort on my part. But the game is also an excellent and frustratingly challenging game, in the tradition of the best wargames.

Which brings me to the current state of my 6x6 table. I’ll be honest, it’s looking a bit dire. At the mid-way point I was somewhat hopeful of making up some of the lost ground, but by the end of July I was coming to terms with the unlikelihood of being able to meet the target of thirty-six games in total. And the start of the year, thirty-six games in fifty-two weeks seemed eminently doable, but this has been an eventful year. I don't think I will complete the task I set myself, and I'm okay with that. Well, I'm a little disappointed.

The project hasn’t been a wash, though. The reason I set myself a 6x6 challenge was to get some games off the shelf and onto the table, and it's done that. I fully intend to get as many 6x6 games in as I can in the last three months of the year. 

I’ve also managed to play Commands and Colors: Ancients - Expansion 1: Greece and the Eastern Kingdoms (GMT Games, 2006). I couldn’t in good conscience shoe-horn this into the 6x6 list – I’ve played too many C&C games of all stripes to seriously consider this a new system to learn (although, as I’ve written previously, it’s a very different beast to out of the box C&C: Ancients), but it is nice to have finally gotten around to playing scenarios that have sat on my shelf for going on eight years or more (it's featured on the list as a reminder of the times we had to play at T's place for whatever reason and there wasn't time to setup one of my games – the nights weren't a total loss).

Keeping a living journal of the games I’ve played has prompted me to play more games, and to branch out into more solo games. I’ve played at least twenty-five games I hadn’t played before since the beginning of the year. That count includes no less than six solitaire games (several of which I’ve reviewed and posted on this blog). That number includes three miniatures games that were new to me – one WWII and two Napoleonic rules-sets – a couple of non-wargames (like the phenomenally good Apocalypse Road (GMT Games, 2020), and a few games I’d describe as war-adjacent, like Caesar! Seize Rome in 20 Minutes! (PSC, 2022 - which was nonetheless a Charles S. Roberts Award nominee for Best Ancients Wargame). And I’ve had a ball playing nearly all of them (I’m not going to waste space on the ones that left me cold; I’d rather talk about the worthwhile ones).

Fire and Stone: Siege of Vienna 1683 (Capstone Games, 2022)

Writing these pieces has also encouraged me to think more clearly and in greater depth about the games I play, and to try to find ways to articulate all that thinking into sentences that make sense. I’ve created something of a rod for my own back; what started as a diary of game-play AARs has grown into something bigger. The response to the reviews has been generally positive (no death threats yet). People seem to like the AARs as well. I like writing these session reports because they help me clarify my thinking around a game before I come to review it. If you see some doubling-up of ideas, or me mentioning again things I may have said already, this will be why. The AARs are like the early drafts; the review is the more polished product.

I’ve got some other ideas I’d like to explore, and some new things should be showing up over the next few months. For non-6x6 game stuff, I’ll be spending most of my time working through reviews for the Charles S. Roberts Awards nominee games, but I’ll probably slip something else in from time to time as they come to hand or as I get them to the table. If there’s anything in particular that you’d like to see more (or less) of, let me know in the comments.

And, as always, thanks for reading this far.