6x6: Fourth Quarter Update - No plan ever survives contact with the enemy

   

 

For a complete snapshot of the process, check out my previous quarterly reports: Q1, Q2, and Q3.

Here I Stand: Wars of the Reformation, 1517-1555 (GMT Games, 2006).

Well, it looked good on paper. Eleven months – 49 weeks in all – to play six games six times each, 36 games in all. It looked doable. But here is the schedule of actual games played.

Even at the end of September, I was a little more hopeful of completing more of my 6x6 challenge than I have. Two six-game runs completed. One nearly completed, but that last game of Napoleon 1806 (Shakos, 20197) – or rather the opportunity to play it out – proved elusive. Two games completely unplayed (I played three games of Brief Border Wars (Compass Games, 2020) two-handed myself of the middle of the year, two of the Third Indochina War and one of Operation Attila, but under the rules of the challenge these didn’t apply). The one Honourable Mention game I put on the list (1960: the Making of a President (GMT Games, 2007), which is decidedly not a wargame, but which I have been keen to get to the table for some time, didn’t get a look in. I did accidentally manage to complete a play-though of six different scenarios from Commands and Colors: Ancients - Greece and the Eastern Kingdoms (GMT Games, 2006) which I applied for extra credit (my regular Monday night gaming partner T and I have both owned copies of C&C:A-Expansion 1 for eight years and some, but in all that time we’ve only ever played Roman scenarios), but it feels a little illegitimate if I couldn’t even complete half of the designated games. Measuring the effort against the goals set, it’s pretty dismal.

Dawn's Early Light: the War of 1812 (Compass Games, 2020).

I’m not proud of my failure to meet the goals that I set myself back I January, but I’m not as distraught by the reality of it as I was half-way through the year by the prospect of it. As part of the background research for this report, I looked over my play record for the year. I’ve been keeping a diary of (most of) the games I’ve played over the course of the year. After doing some tallying, I am quite pleased with the results.

My purpose in setting myself the 6x6 challenge in the first place was to get more games to the table than I had previously. Half-way through 2022, I tallied all the non-RPG games I owned, and marked the ones that I’d played at least once. Of the total (about 230 games all up), I’d played a little over 22%; not even a quarter of the games I owned had seen the light of day. I stewed over this for a few months. In December last year, I started to see people in the groups on Facebook talking about the same problem, and the kinds of actions they intended to take in the coming year. I saw a lot of people talking about a 10x10 challenge. In my ignorance, I assumed they meant ten new games, played ten times each (in my defence, I think a few brave souls actually did mean that); I didn’t realise that most, like idjester on YouTube, who encouraged other content creators to play ten new-to-them games over ten months and post a video playthrough or an AAR for each one by the end of October. I didn’t get the memo and tried to do it the hard way; well, of course I failed.

1565: Siege of Malta - siege tower in place (Worthington Publishing, 2022).

The rules I set myself were to choose the six games from the ones I had already owned for at least a year without playing them. I wanted to clear some of the backlog. The goal was to play games that I hadn’t played yet. Once I decided to do the challenge, I got more excited about playing games, and not just the games I settled on for the challenge. On top of that, I began to seek out more opportunities to play games. This was mostly on my own. I kind of discovered solitaire games at the end of 2022. The first three games I played in 2023 were solitaire games (and new arrivals) and I played them a lot.*

I also began to play more two-player games double-handed. This is something I’ve always done, but only ever to teach myself a new game, so that I show others how to play it.

6x6 challenge aside, I played a lot of games for the first time, and a lot of those I played more than once. In December 2022, I owned 117 base games (excluding expansions, but incorporating stand-alone games with shared rules sets) and I’d played about 25% if those games. By the end of November, I’d added 45 new wargames to that list, for a total of 162. Over the course of the year, I’d managed to get 36% of those new titles to the table, but I’d also managed to raise my total games played to 35%.

By the numbers, over the course of 2023, I played:

• 20 new games with other people; of these 11 were board wargames (including two Grail games, Here I Stand (GMT, 2006) and Republic of Rome (Avalon Hill, 1990)), five were miniatures rules-sets, and a couple of wargame-adjacent games, like Banish the Snakes (GMT Games, 2023) and Apocalypse Road (GMT, 2020)
• Another 19 games, some dedicated solitaire games (ten), or played two-handed (the remaining nine)
• A handful of old favourites, like Commands and Colors: Tricorne (Compass Games, 2017), The World War II miniatures game, Bolt Action (Osprey Games, 2012) and the classic multiplayer game, Condottiere (Z-man Games, 1995).

In all, I managed to engage with 31 new games over the course of the year (about twenty-or-so more than the year before), and read the rules and pushed some counters around on about a dozen more.

Coalition Right flank, Rolica, 17 August, 1808. C&C Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010).

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I’ve also noticed that don’t think of this in terms of “the blog” anymore. In the last month or so, when I’m thinking or talking to someone about it, tend to refer to it by name. I think A Fast Game has outgrown its original – temporary – purpose, and I’m keen to keep writing session reports and reviews and sharing my half-baked opinions on all things wargamey for the foreseeable.

As for plans for the original 6x6 challenge, I don’t think I’d do it again (maybe a 5x5, if provoked, and maybe an all-solitaire game challenge), but I would like to see out the remaining games (and 1960) and deliver the promised reviews of these games as well. As I said in my last post, I’m going to aim for at least twenty reviews in 2024. I’ll still be sticking to reviewing just the games I enjoy, and I think contribute something to the hobby, and I will stick to my commitment to playing a game through several times before reviewing it; I wouldn't feel comfortable trying to offer any kind of opinion on a game I'd only wrangled with once. I’d also like to start doing designer reviews and writing more broadly about the hobby. More on that as it happens.

So, here’s to a prodigious year of gaming in 2023, and more of the same in the coming year. If you’ve read tis far, thank you for putting up with this bit of self-indulgence, and I hope you’ll come back next year for more reviews and AARs. In the meantime, happy New Year, and all the best for 2024.

 

* These were 414BC: Siege of Syracuse, 1565: Siege of Malta (both Worthington Publishing, 2022, and both nominated for Charles S. Roberts Awards in the Ancient wargaming and Gunpowder wargame categories respectively), and Tarawa 1943 (Worthington, 2021). 

2023: the Year in Reviews

 

 

I’ve been writing A Fast Game for nearly eleven months now. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, it started as a journal of my 6x6 self-challenge progress, but has since grown into its own beast, something between therapy and self-indulgence. The original plan was to play six games, six times each, reporting on the individual games and adding any pertinent thoughts, then write a considered review of each game after playing through the six games. But, as the Styx song says, “Nothing Ever goes as planned / It’s a hell of a notion / Even Pharaohs turn to sand / Like a drop in the ocean.”

My 6x6 Challenge hasn’t panned out as I’d envisaged. It seems 36 games in 49 weeks (I didn’t start until well into January) wasn’t the eminently doable task I thought it would be. Near the end of the year, I’ve completed two sets of six games, and reviewed them both. I'll be posting a full breakdown of my 6x6 efforts and where to from here in a couple of days. Watch this space.

But I did play a lot more games than I have in recent years, and some of those, I played often enough times to feel comfortable writing about them. In all, I wrote twelve full game reviews over the last ten months or so, and shared initial thoughts and impressions about maybe two dozen more. It’s something I’ve enjoyed doing, and according to the statistics, the reviews are the most-read posts on the blog.

So, as a community service to anyone who missed one they'd really like to read, here is a set of links to the reviews I’ve posted this year. Next year I’m aiming for twenty, but we’ll see – things don’t always work out the way they’re planned.

 

414BC: Siege of Syracuse (Worthington Publishing, 2022)

1565: Siege of Malta (Worthington Publishing, 2022)

1759: Siege of Quebec (Worthington Publishing, 2019)

Aces of Valor (Legion Wargames, 2023)

Caesar! Seize Rome in 20 minutes! (PSC, 2022)

Chancellorsville, 1863 (Worthington Publishing, 2020)

Freeman’s Farm 1777 (Worthington Publishing, 2019)

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

La Primogenita (Legion Wargames, 2022)

Plains Indian Wars (GMT Games, 2022)

Skyhawk: Rolling Thunder, 1966 (Legion Wargames, 2022)

Undaunted: Normandy (Osprey Games, 2019)

 

 I'll aim for a better spread across publishers next year. But no promises.

Review: Freeman's Farm 1777

 

 

As a reviewer, I’ve always felt like I’ve had a responsibility to maintain a level of objectivity when it came to the things I reviewed. I worked on my university's newspaper (a weekly, back then) for a number of years, and when I wrote about a band I liked or an author I respected, I’d be up-front about it from the get-go. So, without getting too fanboy-ish, I should say in advance that I really like the designer Maurice Suckling's games I’ve played thus far – I’ve reviewed two of them on this blog already, so that’s about 15% of the reviews published on A Fast Game thus far. And here’s another one; Freeman’s Farm 1777 (Worthington Publishing, 2019). This wasn’t by intention; it’s just panned out that way. Suckling’s published boardgames, four published so far, with a fifth slated for mid-2024 after a successful Kickstarter campaign, have been released by Worthington Publishing. I happen to be a fan of Worthington’s games as a rule. When I first played Chancellorsville, 1863 (Worthington Publishing, 2021; I wrote about this earlier in the year), I wasn’t familiar with Professor Suckling’s oeuvre. He is the designer 1565: Siege of Malta (Worthington Publishing, 2022), and the brilliant Chancellorsville, 1863, which shares its design DNA with Freeman’s Farm.

Since playing Chancellorsville, I’ve been keen to try Freeman’s Farm. A couple of months ago I managed to get a second-hand copy in very good condition. Now, after playing it several times, both two-player and solo, I feel like I’m ready to talk about the game.

Freeman’s Farm 1777 is a broad brushstroke simulation of the consequential battle at the end of Burgoyne’s Saratoga campaign during the second full year of the American Revolutionary War. The battle was supposed to be the culmination of the long march General Burgoyne had lead from Canada that began with some initial successes (the taking of Fort Ticonderoga and a qualified victory at the battle of Hubbardton) to a string of withering losses and costly wins, the worst being that of the Battle of Freeman’s Farm.

The British applying pressure on the Colonial right.

Appearance

Like every Worthington game I’ve ever come across, careful consideration has been put into every aspect of the production of Freeman’s Farm. The board is roughly 17” by 22” in size and mounted. The map represents the field of battle in the style of a map from the period. Like the board for Chancellorsville, there is no hex or grid overlay. Instead, initial positions for the units present at the battle are marked out in a bold colour representing the nationality of the units, while subsequent manoeuvre locations are marked in lighter hues, with guiding arrows to demonstrate which units can access these secondary and tertiary positions. The positions are also labelled and are referred to as such in the relevant units’ orders lists. The position of Freeman’s Farm, in roughly the centre of the play area, is tenuously held by skirmishers under Learned. If Hamilton (British Regulars) can dislodge these skirmishers (an attack order, with a successful hit to remove the skirmishers), that unit may move into the contested Farm space. Freeman’s Farm can also be occupied by both Learned and the Hessian mercenaries under Riedesel (green blocks, British left flank). In each of the left corners of the board (by the players’ orientations) is a Combat Results Table, both unobtrusive and useful, as this is a game of swift and heated action.

The game pieces representing troops are elongated wooden cubes, while artillery is represented by wooden discs. I like a game with wooden pieces; I appreciate the visceral sense of loss when a force is reduced block by block. Each hit will remove a block; for the British, some first hits will remove skirmishers, allowing them to traverse to more advantageous locations.

Units are also represented by cards, to be displayed before the player. Each card offers the choice of orders available to that unit when activated, the number of dice the unit will roll in combat and the special conditions in which they may gain an extra die, and most also present a Morale track to trace the unit’s diminishing cohesion. Each time a unit is ordered, it drops one Morale point. These can also be lost as a result of combat, and once a unit drops to six points remaining, the player must roll for a Morale check; if the result on a single die is higher than the unit’s current Morale level, that unit is broken and disbands.

Hamilton has taken Freeman's Farm, but can he hold it
under the pressure from Poor and Glover 

If one side can destroy – or cause to break – three of the other side’s rated units (i.e., a unit with its own Morale track; for these purposes, Breymann (Reserve) on the British side and the Colonial Artillery do not signify), they will win by sudden death victory. If the game plays out the full fifteen turns without a clear winner, the British lose the game. Historically, the British won a pyrrhic victory at Saratoga; while they held their ground and claimed the day, their losses were so grave as to make leave them in a weakened state for the following battle at Bemis Heights three weeks later, so the victory defaulting to the Colonial forces feels right.

The whole package comes in a sturdy two-inch box, adorned with an evocative cover illustration, presumably of Morgan’s Rifles sniping at the Redcoats gathering for a charge. As I’ve said, presentation is Worthington’s strong suit.

Nixon's chance to dislodge Phillips' guns.

Play Experience

Each player begins with a fifteen-card activation deck. These are shuffled and the player’s draw three cards from their deck. This is their starting hand. Beginning with the British, the players take turns playing an activation card, paying the one-point cost of activating that unit on its Morale track on their morale track for that unit, and then choosing an order from those listed on that unit’s record card. The active player also earns momentum points (represented by black cubes), which can be used as a form of currency in the game, to purchase rerolls or Tactics cards, of which there are always three on display in a tableau within reach of both players. These tactics cards usually offer some small advantage for play in a subsequent round (such as adding an extra die to an attack or forcing your opponent to reroll one die from their successful attack), though some have persistent qualities. At the end of the Colonial player’s turn, the cards all shuffle down a rank left-to-right, with the right-most card being discarded.

Each unit has a selection of orders it may carry out on activation, including movement or engagement orders, sometimes in unison. This may sound limiting, but it actually makes the play run more smoothly, and the orders are coherent with what actions that unit in its current position would be able to perform. Once you’re used to the sequence of play, the game finds its own cadence.

Brief respite (sample Tactic card).

Freeman’s Farm moves along quickly, both in two player and solitaire modes. The back of the box says “Victory within one hour,“ and as I have observed elsewhere, Worthington has the most reliable game-length advice of any game publisher I’ve come across. All of the games I’ve played – two-player and solo – have come in at between 45 and 55 minutes. That being said, it’s a pretty intense 50-odd minutes, and not for the faint of heart.

The best endorsement I can offer for Freeman’s Farm actually comes from my brother-in-law and regular gaming buddy, who was my first human opponent. When we finished the game with T’s defeat as the British; the first thing he said, was “Can we play this again next week?”

Appraisal

Freeman’s Farm is a new take on a pivotal Revolutionary War battle that has been modelled in countless wargames, including Worthington’s own Hold the Line: The American Revolution (Worthington Publishing, 2016).

Fraser's regiment breaks under the pressure.

Much like David Thompson, Maurice Suckling brings a unique sensibility to tabletop wargaming. Coming from a background in videogames, Suckling now teaches different aspects of game design and history at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York state. His upcoming games, Crisis: 1914 (Worthington, slated for the first half of 2024), about the events and negotiations in Europe that lead with tragic inevitability to the outbreak of the Great War, Peace 1905 (Fort Circle Games, ~2024), which simulates the peace negotiations held by the belligerents at the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War, and Rebellion: Britannia (GMT Games, ~2024), which has made the cut on GMT’s P500 list, all speak to a diverse interest both in history and in gaming.

Like Chancellorsville, 1863 and 1565: Siege of Malta, I cannot speak highly enough of Freeman’s Farm. I don’t think it will be as enthusiastically re-playable as Chancellorsville, which has a few more things going on mechanically (hidden movement in the two-player version and simulated hidden movement in the solo bot) which keeps it fresher, but that’s probably an unfair comparison.

On its own merits, Freeman’s Farm offers a simple and fast-playing but deeply immersive and tactically confronting play experience. It may seem like a one-trick pony, being essentially a single-scenario game with rigidly programmed movement and action, but that would be looking at it through the lens of hex-and-counter play. The rigidity of the options is the very thing that makes Freeman’s Farm such a compelling game experience. The inability to do whatever the hell you want at any given moment models the difficulties of command and situational awareness in the period and in this particular battle extraordinarily well. This is one of those games that will reward repeated play with frustration and understanding in equal measure.

 

 

By the Numbers: Wish-list games, Grail games, and Aspirational games

   

 

Commenting on a post on FB recently, I mentioned in an off-hand manner that The Red Burnoose (Hit ‘Em with a Shoe, 2022) – the subject of the post – was about fourth on my list of sought-after wargames. The fellow-gamer who had posted originally about The Red Burnoose called me on that – a reminder of the dangers of making off-hand comments on social media – asking politely that if that was fourth on the list, what were first, second and third in the said list.

I usually have a couple of games in the back of my head that I would like to get. It’s never been formalised into a list before, although, earlier this year, with the release of the Charles S. Roberts Awards recipients and nominees for 2022 I did go through and make a couple as desirable. I replied saying that Gregory Smith’s Imperial Tide: the Great War, 1914-1918 (Compass Games, 2022), and Gina Willis’s A Glorious Chance (Legion Wargames, 2023) occupied the number 2 and 3 spots, but that my White Whale game was Death Valley: Battles for the Shenandoah (GMT Games, 2019)*.

I’ve been keen to dive into a game with some crunchiness to the rules for some time, but simply can’t table anything much larger than two standard maps. That excludes a lot of system games like Europa, GOSS and GTS. But looking at American Civil War Games, both the Great Battles of the American Civil War games (GBACW, these days exclusively from GMT, but with their origins in SPI), and the Great Campaigns of the American Civil War (GCACW, from Multi-Man Publishing). Both systems offer a compelling experience, and while some folks prefer one over the other, a lot of people play and enjoy both.

Being from Multi-Man Publishing, GCACW games tend to be their own special kind of expensive, but if you don’t mind sticking to the more recent releases, GBACW is a not-house-refinancing-ly costly road to take (although some of the old Richard Berg titles can run to $500 or more on eBay and elsewhere). I secured a copy of Into the Woods: The Battle of Shiloh, April 6-7, 1862 (GMT Games, 2022), earlier in the year, and I thought I had a line on Death Valley and a very good price around the same time from a UK retailer, only to find what they shipped was not what they advertised, but a ziplock-bagged supplement to the main game called Battles of the Shenandoah: a Death Valley expansion (GMT Games, 2022). When it proved impossible to return the item (because I wasn’t a UK-based customer), I cut my losses and decided to find a copy of the game elsewhere.

Owning the expansion steeled me resolve to find a copy of the actual game, but I still wasn’t prepared to sell the farm to get it. My hopes of nabbing a copy in the GMT Summer Sale were dashed when they sold out of the game five days before the sale started. I’ve been following a couple of copies in various places online but adding the shipping costs puts them all in the region of $180.00-plus. The most I’ve ever laid out for a game was $165.00**, about three years ago (when the Australian dollar was a little healthier), and that was only because I’d sold some RPG materials online and had about $400 in my PayPal account, and there wasn’t three or four cheaper games I really wanted to get at the time.

My Facebook response was a little flippant. It was truthful in the moment, but there wasn’t much depth of consideration. Those were probably the four games I most wanted to be able to play right then, but there are others. After some consideration, I think I can offer a short, not at all conclusive list of games I either can see or would like to see in my future. I can even break them down into three categories. To wit:

Wish-list games: these are games that are anticipated (have been announced for an intended future printing) or reasonably easily accessible at what these days passes for an acceptable price. GMT’s P500 list, Compass’s pipeline and Legion Wargames’ CPO list are all examples of this. My wish-list with Noble Knight runs to about nine pages, and that’s after some pruning and purging. A few of these are must-haves, but in the main they are games that I’d like to try out for one reason or another. There is inevitably some overlap between wish-list games and those in the other two groups mentioned here.

One more wish-list game.

Aspirational games: I can only speak for myself, but there are games that I’ve acquired over the years knowing full well I was unlikely to have the chance to play them, or to do any more than read the rules and clip the counters in the foreseeable future, but with the hope that one day I would be able to get them to the table. I don’t think this is driven by a fear of missing out; I own games that I’ve never played but indeed do harbour a belief that I will play them, realistically not before retirement, but one day. I call these aspirational games. Some might see them as a waste of money, but I prefer to look at them as an investment in my gaming future.

Grail games: these are the stuff of legend. Usually older games, certainly out-of-print, and sometimes not even particularly good compared to contemporary analogues. But there is something like an aura around these games. They might be spoken about on chat-groups or YouTube channels with measured reverence. An example that springs to mind for me is Fire in the East (Game Designers Workshop, 1984). A stand-alone game with six maps and 2,500-unit counters and covering the whole of the Eastern front – at sixteen miles to a hex – from June ’41 to March ’42 and a projected playing time of 40+ hours, it was also a module of the overall Europa game system that covered the entire European theatre. This arrived in my FLGS when I was an impressionable teenager, and I was immediately smitten by the idea of a game that would take a solid week of gaming to complete. Being the sensible sort, I knew there was no place I could set it up, let alone leave it set up in mid play for days on end, so I never seriously thought of buying it, but the idea stayed with me. I’m still envious whenever I see photos of a big game like Wacht am Rhein (SPI, 1977) set up at a convention.

Personally, I don’t feel the need to own my Grail games, or at least not to seek them out to the exclusion of others, not in the way that I do feel the need to acquire some of my Wish-list or Aspirational games. I would be content to get to play some Grail games, sometime in the nebulous future, Though I know how unlikely that might be.

So, what follows is a sample of games from the three aforementioned lists. These are the ones that spring to mind most readily. Given time, I’m sure I could come up with many more.

 

WISH-LIST GAMES

A quick look at my actual wish-lists (and pre-orders) on various sites provided this sampling:

·   Crossing the Line: Aachen, 1944 (Vuca Simulations, 2019)

·   Donnerschlag: Escape from Stalingrad (Vuca Simulations, 2022)

Vuca produce sensationally good games (check out my unboxings of Task Force (Vuca, 2023) and Chase of the Bismarck (Vuca, 2023)), and these two have a reputation for ease of play and replayability. Always a good choice for a collection.

·   Napoleon’s Wheel: Danube Campaign, Part 1 (Operational Studies Group, 2020)

Looking over my collection, the majority of the games I own are Tactical (or Grand Tactical), but I really enjoy operational level games. Why don’t I have more operational games? Maybe because I don’t have a formal Collection Development policy (a subject for another post). Gary from Ardwulf’s Lair has a lot of good things to say about Kevin Zucker’s Library of Napoleonic Battles. They’re not cheap, but they usually have four or five battles to a box (Napoleon’s Wheel has five), and at least one of two of them will usually be playable on a single map-sheet. The rules have evolved over the years, but all the older games ae backwards-compatible with the new rules. The game has now been designed to accommodate a standardised deck of game-cards, and Napoleon’s Wheel comes with the cards, making it the perfect gate-way to the series.

·   Ambush at LZ Albany (Modern War #24 - Decision Games, 2016)

·   Block by Block: the Battle of Huế (Modern War #48 – Decision Games, 2020)

Magazine games are a good and relatively inexpensive way to explore a historical conflict situation. In truth, I already have games that cover these two battles (Silver Bayonet (GMT Games, 2016 and Fields of Fire Vol. 2: With theOld Breed (GMT, ####) respectively), but different games will focus on different aspects of a battle, and offer different challenges.

·   Rebel Fury: Five Battles from Chancellorsville and Chickamauga (GMT Games P500, slated for release early 2024)

The American Civil War is of abiding interest to me, and this game marks designer Mark Herman’s return to the subject. Also, any wargame that comes with multiple battles in a single box is worth getting for the replayability alone.

 

ASPIRATIONAL GAMES

·   Empire of the Sun (GMT Games, 2005)

Speaking of Mark Herman, this is a game I’ve been circling for some time. I’m very keen to get it, and I know it comes with a solid solo bot (Erasmus), but I know it will take a much bigger commitment in time and concentration than I’m in a position to dedicate to a single game at this point.

·   Pericles: the Peloponnesian Wars (GMT Games, 2017)

Yet another Mark Hermans game, the second in the Great Statesman series. It’s probably more a reputational thing around this game than it being a difficult game to assimilate. I’ve played Versailles, 1919 (GMT, 2020), which is the third in the series, and I’m hoping to get Churchill (GMT, 2015) to the table over the summer. The daunting part for me with Pericles is finding three other players who will commit to learning the game and seeing it through.

·   Chase of the Bismarck: Operation Rheinübung 1941 (Vuca Simulations, 2023)

Chase of the Bismarck is a big game. Not the biggest I own – Probably not quite as big a footprint as a two-map-plus-Orders-of-Battle-charts game like The Russian Campaign, Fifth Edition (GMT, 2023), but it is a sprawling, double blind set-up with lots of moving parts. Each player has their own duplicate board, and there are rules in place to dispense with the need for a referee. The rules are simple enough – I read through them in a couple of hours and the who game seemed both straightforward and understandable, but it was clear that the experience playing the game would be a searingly engaging cat-and-mouse duel that will take a good six or seven hours, unless the German task force is discovered in the first three or four rounds (which might happen, but you couldn’t count on it) . Add to that the better part of an hour spent setting the game up, and teaching a new player the rules on the fly, the sheer weight of the project feels almost insurmountable. Almost. I'd still like to test that, when the opportunity arises.

 

GRAIL GAMES

·   Here I Stand: Wars of the Reformation, 1517-1555 (GMT, 2006)

Some games have obtained a legendary quality and are spoken of in reverential terms. Here I Stand is one of those games. Ideally played with six players, each managing a single faction, the game plays out the dual contests of European and Near-Eastern states duking it out, while a battle for hearts and minds is waged in parallel between the established Catholic Church and the heretical Protestant cause.

This is one grail game I’ve actually be able to play. This year, our Wednesday night host, B, dusted off his copy and we played it, a turn a week over five weeks. In the end, England won, though it was a close contest with nearly everyone taking turns a frontrunner. A very satisfying experience and one everyone is keen to revisit.

·   The Third Winter: The Battle for the Ukraine September1943-April 1944 (Multi-Man Publishing/The Gamers, 2021)

·   DAK2: The Campaign in North Africa, 1940-1942 (Multi-Man Publishing/The Gamers, 2004)

[I will note here that this and the other Grails games hereto listed are merely representative of the game series of which they are a part.]

This blog is dedicated primarily to short and sharp wargames that still deliver a satisfying experience (the clue is in the name), but I do like a game what offers a deeper experience. I just don’t have the capacity – time- or space-wise – to accommodate that particular pleasure. Three or four (or eight) map-games are a denied me. I’ve often jealously watched convention walkthroughs by folks on YouTube like Justegarde lingering over monster games. I’m particularly drawn to MMP’s Operational Combat Series (OCS) games. I’ve never visited the US, but I have a vague hope of one day getting to a longer convention like the World Boardgame Championships (WBC), and getting in on a game, playing and learning alongside a handful of other like-minded folks, all committed to the same intensive, immersive simulation, for at least a couple of rounds. That would be a dream fulfilled. There’s a reason I refer to them as Grail games.

 

·   Last Blitzkrieg: Wacht am Rhein, The Battle of the Bulge (Multi-Man Publishing, 2016)

·   Panzers Last Stand: Battles for Budapest, 1945 (Multi-Man Publishing, 2021)

What I just said about OSC probably goes double for MMP’s Battalion Combat Series (BTS) games. I like a high-level game, but I truly love intricacy and imperative of a regiment or battalion-level game (this is a big part of the appeal of Mark Simonitch’s ‘4X games). I’ve heard and read nothing but good things about BTS games; hopefully, one day, I might get to try one out.

·   La Bataille d'Auerstædt (Marshal Enterprises , 1977)

·   La Bataille de Ligny (Clash of Arms Games, 1991)

·   La Bataille des Quatre Bras (Clash of Arms Games, 1991)

The La Bataille rules have evolved over the last forty-odd years, but their appeal has remained with a staunchly dedicated following. La Bataille games are produced by two separate publishers under a loose gentleman’s agreement, with slightly different rules-sets that are nonetheless each compatible with the other publisher’s games. It would be worth investigating for that reason alone.

La Bataille is broadly considered to be the preeminent grand tactical Napoleonic rules system. Any gamer worth his salt with an abiding interest in Napoleonic warfare would make it his duty to try this game given the opportunity. What makes it probably the most grail-like of Grail games is its rarity; Marshal Enterprise have released a new game in the La Bataille series every year or two since 2013, but each one has had a print run of just 400 copies. In spite of this, you’d be hard-pressed to find a serious wargaming convention in the US, United Kingdom and maybe Spain that didn’t have at least one or two La Bataille games in the offing.

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That’s a snapshot of my thinking around what’s on offer in the larger world of board wargaming. This has been a much longer than intended post, so if you’re reading this, thank you for persevering.

If you have any thoughts you’d like to share on the any of the games mentioned here, or want to chide me over that one game or game-series you can’t believe I left out, please leave a comment below; I’m always interested to hear other people’s thoughts on these things.

 

* There is a happy ending to this tale. While I’ve been preparing this post, I’ve been clearing out dozens of Last-Minute-Christmas-Shopping emails. I stopped when I saw one from The War Library. For Australian readers, this is an online shop operating out of Sydney. They sell miniatures, individual sprues, scenery, and an eclectic range of books and board wargames. They are also one of the only outfits I'll trust to buy second-hand games from, knowing they will have given them the once-over before posting them for sale. I've bought a handful of books and games from them over the last couple of years (my first purchase was Invoice No. 0008), and I have bever been disappointed with either the product or their care in shipping it.

On the off-chance, I had a quick look at their listings, and on the second page they had a pre-loved copy of the much-sought-after Death Valley, and at what I considered a reasonable price. With the blessing of Australia Post, it should arrive by the end of the week.

  

** For the Curious, the game in question was Carl Paradis’s No Retreat! Italian Front, 1943-45 (GMT Games, 2015). I like the No Retreat! System, though I get why it’s not as popular as a lot of game series, and while both No Retreat! The Russian Front (GMT, 2011) and No Retreat! the North African Front (GMT, 2013) are both on the P500 list for reprinting, I thought it was unlikely the Italian Front ever would be. I raised this with Carl about eighteen months ago and he agreed.

The second most expensive was Holdfast: Eastfront, 1941-1945 (Worthington Publishing, 2017), re-working and expansion of Worthington’s Holdfast: Russia,1941-1942 (Worthington, 2013), for which I paid nearly as much. That one was definitely out of print for good. I didn’t back it when the Kickstarter campaign came around and had always regretted that decision. I’d still like to get Holdfast Tunisia (Worthington,

Both of these games I bought from Noble Knight Games, each during a sale. I think the discounts were 10% and 16% respectively.