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).