I’ve never
been very good with New Year’s resolutions, so this year I instead made a
promise to myself. It was last year, a week or so before Christmas. I
told myself that while collecting games might be a legitimate hobby for some, I
derived the most pleasure from playing them, and so I should put more effort
into taking the opportunities that present themselves to play games instead of
merely thinking about playing them.
I did some
sums in the middle of last year, and across all the games I owned (family games
as well as wargames) I’d only played about 22% of them. Non-play has been a
bugbear of mine since then, so when the time for reflection came around, I
thought I should to something about it. My self-imposed 6x6 project and this
blog grew out of my desire to get more games to the table, both by myself (solitaire
and solo) and with others.
So, how am I
doing? I’ve written broadly about getting more games to the table in my
quarterly progress reports about my 6x6 efforts. Here I thought I’d take a
snapshot of where I’m at generally. I am making some headway, but there is some
distance to go yet.
Currently, I
have 160 core titles in my wargame collection. I’ve left the definition of wargame
fairly loose here; arguments abound around whether this or that game is a
wargame. To take one example of a publisher of wargames that I have some
familiarity with: GMT Games was the first publisher I bought from directly. I certainly
don’t buy everything they produce, but I don’t think I’ve ever experienced
buyer’s remorse over a single purchase of a GMT game. So, I’m counting in my
wargame collection titles like Churchill: the Big Three Struggle for Peace
(GMT Games, 2015), Twilight Struggle: the Cold War, 1945-1989 (GMT, 2005),
and Versailles, 1919 (GMT, 2020), but not Welcome to Centerville (2017). By "core titles" I mean base games; I've got all six published boxed expansions for Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT, 2010), but I've only counted the first title in his number. Basically, all stand alone games are included in this count. I've also left out some special cases, like Undaunted: Reinforcements (Osprey Games, 2021), which brings a new solitaire mode to the mix, but doesn't constitute a standalone game.
I did some
quick and dirty arithmetic (percentages are rounded to the nearest whole
number). At the end of last year, I owned (by my own definition) 117 wargames. I’d
already started to make an effort to play games I hadn’t yet got around to, and
there was a noticeable up-tick from the overall 22% at mid-year*.
|
Wargame collection |
Core titles |
Games played |
% of total |
|
To Dec 2022 |
117 |
29 |
25% |
|
Acquired 2023 |
45 |
16 |
36% |
|
Current total |
162 |
57 |
35% |
I was a little
surprised to learn I’d acquired 45 new games (not all new; roughly a quarter
were bought second-hand). About a third were pre-orders from GMT and Legion or
Kickstarter fulfilments from Worthington.
Of those 45
new games for the year, I’ve managed to get more than a third played at least
once, and most of them I’ve played several times (thought these are mostly
solitaire games or multi-player games with good solitaire options). The played
number might be higher if it wasn’t for the fact that at least eight of these
games have arrived in the last three or four weeks, but circumstances haven’t allowed
me the time to get to them yet (having said that, excuses are like assholes…).
Still, I’m
happy with the overall progress. And it’s not just about the numbers. It’s not
a chore to play a new game. Okay, sometimes the rules can be a chore, but I
haven’t hit one yet that I said, this is a waste of time. I’ve actually had fun
with every single one of them, even when I’ve lost. So the happiness quotient
is probably a few percentage points higher than it might otherwise have been.
So, that’s
the story so far. I think I can make sixty games played by the end of December
(three more), maybe even bring the number of new games bought this year that I’ve
played to twenty (four more). I don’t believe in setting unreachable goals. Game on.
* I’m a
wonk at heart, and I was doing – updating, actually – an audit of the games we owned. I
thought it would be interesting to put a tick against every game in the
collection that we’d managed to get to the table at least once. The 22% of
games played carried pretty closely from the overall number of games we owned to
the subset of the wargames that I would never be able to get my wife to play (a
little shy of 23%).
Note: while the illustration is a stock photo, we do own an original copy of Trivial Pursuit. We have friends interstate who we catch up with once or twice a year, and every time we do we have a "guys vs gals" grudge-match, using the original questions. In the interests of full disclosure, I'm the only one at the table old enough to remember some of the "current affairs" questions from the mid-eighties, but he womenfolk win two times out of three,
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