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.