By the Numbers: Wargame Collection by Publisher

 

 

I’ve been delving into the stats of my game collection. I keep a spreadsheet of what games we have, which has come in useful lately; I’ve been selling off a bunch of family games that we’ve either never played or are unlikely to go back to. My wife comes from a gaming family, and she has her old favourites (like Win, Place & Show (Avalon Hill, 1977, but originally part of the 3M Sports Game series), seriously, the best horse-racing game ever made, and Rail Baron (Avalon Hill, 1977)), as well as a few we’ve discovered since we’ve been married (like Dominion (Rio Grande Games, 2008) and Alhambra: the Card Game (Queen Games, 1992), so there’s no point hanging on to stuff that isn’t going to get played. I suppose this is another aspect of my wanting to get more games generally – and wargames in particular – to the table.

I’ve been using the information in my game spreadsheet to keep track of may progress in working through my collection. I wrote about this in a previous post. Here I thought it would be interesting to look at the publisher breakdown of my current collection. Here’s an annoying pie-chart with a hard-to-make-out colour legend.

 

Again, this just covers the base games in the collection. It comes as no surprise to me that the largest chunk of games in my collection comes from GMT Games (44% of core titles). I’ll point out again that these are just the base games; adding the expansions for Commands and Colors: Ancients (2006), C&C: Napoleonics (2010), Combat Commander (2006), Tank Duel (2019), and Wing Leader (2015) would add another 28 titles to that count (I do have a completist tendency that sometimes gets the better of me; it’s one of the reasons I’ve never got into Warfighter (Dan Verssen Games. 2014). I tend to show brand loyalty when it comes to publishers. I was a huge fan of SPI back in the day – their games made up nearly all of my adolescent collection – and I was heartbroken when the company was absorbed (FitA) by TSR. When I started playing and buying wargames again, GMT seemed to be everywhere, and everyone I talked to recommended one or another of their games.

When I was less committed to wargames (spending more time and resources on RPGs), I bought a not inconsiderable number of GMT one-off games quite cheaply as package fillers when buying things from US sellers (damn, but I miss the days of dollar-dollar parity. I’ve got GMT games that I bought from game stores to make up the difference to get free shipping, like Halls of Montezuma (GMT, 2009) and Mike Nagel’s Sun of York (GMT, 2005) but never actually got to the table (though I expect to get to them eventually). This has artificially bloated GMT’s share of my collection.

That brand loyalty has extended to Worthington Publishing (previously Worthington Games) whose games make up over a quarter of the collection. I think I can confidently say I’ve never been disappointed by a Worthington game. A lot of them seem to be on the simpler end of the wargame complexity continuum, and I get why that might put some folks off, but if it's just snobbery, it's misplaced. In my experience, every Worthington game I’ve played, starting with Boots on the Ground (2010), has presented a rich narrative experience with a lot of decision points throughout the play. I’ve played a higher proportion of Worthington titles owned than any other publisher, 18 out of 26 games - nearly 70% - probably because they tend to be easy games to teach and learn. Of the eleven reviews I’ve posted on the blog thus far, five of them have been for Worthington games.

The title of fastest-growing publisher representation in my collection goes to Compass Games. Roughly two thirds of the fifteen games on my core list (plus the French expansion for Commands and Colors: Tricorne) I’ve bought in the last two years, and I've got a bead on a couple more. Compass’s production quality is, in my experience, excellent (and they’re very responsive when they screw something up, like sending out free errata counters out to every customer that bought a game directly from them, free of (extra) charge. I’ve liked all the games; my only complaint would be that sometimes the choices around the rulebook layout (mostly background colour or colour graduation, like in No Peace Without Spain (Compass Games, 2011) make the rules a little difficult to read (Barbarians at the Gate (Compass, 2023) falls into this category as well). Well, I find them harder to read. But I’m old and should remember to use my reading glasses more often. Compass is one of the most prolific publishers in the wargaming space, and they make a lot of winners. Expect to see some Compass game reviews over the coming months.

Something worth pointing out is a full 17% of my collection is made up of games from European publishers (okay, I’m including Osprey and PSC in this number, but everything else in my collection is from North American publishers). For a long time. Wargaming publishing was the domain of a handful of prolific publishers (Avalon Hill, SPI) and a couple of smaller operations, like The Chaosium (and Warhammer, across the pond). In the last twelve or fifteen years we’ve been seeing a lot more really good games coming out of Continental Europe. That is to say, there have been European designers creating fun, thoughtful and innovative wargames and European publishers printing them for a lot longer than that, but they’re now making their way outside of Europe, and with rules translated into English. It might be an artefact of the rise in popularity of Eurogames like Settlers of Catan (KOSMOS, 2008) in the English-speaking world. Frankly, I could care less. If it means I easier for me to access games like Verdun, 1916: Steel Inferno (Fellowship of Simulation), Great War Commander (Hexasim, 2018), and Chase of the Bismarck (Vuca Simulations, 2023), then let a thousand Euros bloom, let the children play Power Grid (2F-Spiele, 2004).

The rest of my collection is a scattered mix, though Legion Wargames is nearly into double digits. Some games I’ve bought because the subject interested me, or I wanted to see how the designer approached a particular situation. Some were recommended by people whose judgement I respect.

And some acquisitions were the result of a confluence of factors. I read recently an interview with John Poniske (if I ever do a post of designers represented in my collection, he’ll be up near the top), and he mentioned his favourite of his own designs was Lincoln’s War (Multi-Man Publishing, 2013), because he felt it achieved what he set out to do with it. About the same time, I was ordering some games from Noble Knight Games for shipping to a friend visiting the states. I needed to make up another $10.00 to qualify for free shipping (the shipping would have cost a tenner, but it’s the principle), and NKG had a second-hand copy of Lincoln’s War for $10.45. Like it was meant to be. When it arrived, not only was it unpunched, but it included a complete set of pieces crafted at about 160% larger size on craft board. I suspect the previous owner was a play-tester for the game, for John had written a really nice thank-you message inside the box cover.

A couple of the titles represented here are miniatures or miniature-adjacent games. While I really enjoy playing miniatures games, I’m not a big minis guy, I possess no real talent for painting, nor do I have the time, patience or space to acquire that particular hobby. B, our Wednesday-night host, lives in a house with a whole second floor dedicated to gaming, and much of that space is taken up with immaculately painted lead and resin figures; I live in an inner-city apartment, and I’m looking at having to introduce a one-in/one-out policy for boxed games. I’ll save talking about those games for another post.