By the Numbers: Collection analysis and classification by divers methodologies – Part II

 

 

Note: This is the second part of my journey down the rabbit hole of collection analysis. Here is where we look at the working end of my games, and gain some understanding of the factors influencing my selection process. Part I, where I classified my games by publisher – which I had done once before, though the collectin has groen some since then – and by historical period setting, using the (arguably inadequate) Charles S. Roberts Awards categories from the 2022 awards. In this post, I’m breaking my collection down into the types of items that make it up..

 To get a better idea of my own collecting habits, I took a broad-brushstroke view of what constituted my game collection. I broke the list down into three categories:

 - Stand-alone games. These are one-off titles intended to stand on their own. Most are like Waterloo: Napoleon’s Last Battle (Companion WarGames, 2019), or Prairie Aflame! The Northwest Rebellion, 1885 (Legion Wargames, 2020). Sometimes a stand-alone game will have its own expansion, as in the case of Time of Crisis: The Roman Empire in Turmoil, 235-284 AD (GMT Games, 2017) and its “extras” package, The Age of Iron and Rust (GMT Games, 2019), which introduced some additional cards and non-player AI options. The expansion doesn’t radically change the play of the game or refashion it into another situation, so I’d still class it as a stand-alone game. The expansions o one-off games are still counted among the Expansions.

RAF: Battle of Britain. Definitely a stand-alone game, and really quite brilliant.

 - Series Games. These tend to be games that share a common rules-set or functional grounding. The Band of Brothers series of squad-level tactical games from Worthington Publishing is an obvious example, as is the Carl Paradis’s No Retreat! theatre-encompassing games published by GMT. The attraction of a series game is not having to grok an entirely new rules-set each time you get a new game. If you have played and enjoyed Death Valley: Battles of the Shenandoah (GMT Games, 2019), then picking up Into the Woods: The Battle of Shiloh, April 6-7, 1862 (GMT Games, 2022) will be a simple thing and no trouble. Some games included in this section are titles like No Peace Without Spain (Compass Games, 2011), the first in the No Peace series, now up to four titles in print with a fifth, covering the Thirty Years War, in development, but I only own the first, and Brief Border Wars (Compass Games, 2020) which is the only volume in print thus far, but at least a second is due for publication this year.

France '40 - a splendid example of a series game, or perhaps not.
I did an unboxing post that you can read here.

 - Expansions. Technically the base games and their expansions; these amount to additional material supplementary to an otherwise complete and self-contained game. An obvious contender for this section is Combat Commander: Europe (GMT Games, 2006), and it’s legacy of boxed and zip-loc bagged additional scenarios and materials, and the seemingly ever-growing family of Commands and Colors games, of which I possess – ahem – several, each with most or all of their additional boxes. This section also includes one-off expansions like SpaceCorp: Ventures (GMT Games, 2021) for John Butterfield’s SpaceCorp: 2025-2300AD (GMT Games, 2018). (Yes, I know SpaceCorp isn’t technically a wargame, but my list - my rules; the kid stays in the picture.)

C&C Napoleonics. Definitely an expansion; it says so on the box.

And so, to the numbers. It probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that series games make the lion’s share of my collection, a whopping 49%. I think this is an artefact of historical trends of opportunities to play more than anything else. I’ve mentioned this previously, so I won’t go into too much detail here, but I didn’t have a regular wargaming habit until 2010. I had been buying wargames before that, and sometimes taking them out and soloing two-handed, and I had a regular RPG game I’d been going to for a few years by them, but in 2010 my wife was sick in hospital for about four months. In that time, Jess’s elder sister and her husband would have me around once a week for dinner – mostly to make sure I was looking after myself, I think – and one night I took over Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010), which T had just brought back for me from the US about a month before. That turned into a weekly-ish thing after Jess was back home, and we’ve been meeting most weeks since.

T is a doctor in a local hospital, and runs a section there, so he’s got a pretty serious job and he takes seriously, and doesn’t have a lot of bandwidth for anything outside of it. C&C: Naps is a relatively simple game at heart. There are variants to the rules for each army, but the core mechanisms stay true for the entire series. Which is why we played that pretty much exclusively for the first nine or so years, working through the expansions as they came out and revisiting the Peninsula when the mood took us (and wearing though one board and a set of dice labels in the process). Since about 2019 we’ve expanded to other flavours of Commands and Colors, and more recently (maybe the middle of 2022) we’ve been breaking ground outside the C&C system, most recently with WWII Commander: Battle of the Bulge (Compass Games, 2020 – you can find a review here), Brief Border Wars (Compass Games, 2019 – review forthcoming), and Napoléon 1806 (Shakos, 2017 – review here), but almost exclusively series games, so that when we move on to the next one - in this case, probably Napoléon,1807 (Shakos, 2020) – there’s less of a learning curve before getting down to playing.

Expansions make up the smallest section of my collection (only 20% in total), which did surprise me a little. While The Commands and Colors base games appear in the Series game count, all of the expansions appear in this section. The same with the Combat Commander: Europe boxed expansions and scenario packs, and the Panzer and MBT expansions, and every Flying Pig Games game that I own – and there are several – has at least one expansion in the list. But the above stated make up nearly all the count between them. There are a few strays, like the aforementioned Age of Iron and Rust for Time of Crisis, or Ventures for SpaceCorp, but not all that many. I guess this also speaks to the habit of keeping to series rules, especially for two-player games (something I’ll return to later).

Stand-alone games make up a goodly proportion of the collection (the remaining 31%). These are probably more representative of my magpie interests in history and mechanics. One of the joys of playing wargames is delving into the history represented, but another is seeing how the designer has attempted to recreate various aspects of the situation through the game’s mechanics. An obvious example of this is the optional or mandatory events in various card-driven games (CDGs) like Washington’s War (GMT Games, 2010), Dawn’s Early Light: the War of 1812 (Compass Games, 2020), or Plains Indian Wars (GMT Games, 2022 – you can read my review here). But often the best way to reflect a quirk of history is a simple mechanical adjustment, like the second impulse for motorised units in The Russian Campaign (Jedko Games, 1974) to replicate the blitzkrieg tactics of the Wehrmacht. Or how in La Primogenita (Legion Wargames, 2022), each unit is given a stacking “weight,” and the coarseness of the terrain can restrict the mass of firepower you can bring to bear on a target hex; it’s a small thing but it adds immeasurably to the verisimilitude of the experience of play. There isn't so much room for this kind of variation in series rules, but that's okay, because different types of games are trying to achieve different things.

Pacific Tide, Second Edition. Sand alone? Series game?
All I'm sure if is it's a really fun game.

Some people commit their ludological lives to a single pursuit, like chess. In our hobby t's more commonly a game-system like Advanced Squad Leader (Avalon Hill, 1985), or La Bataille (Clash of Arms/Marshal Enterprises). I can appreciate the allure of devoting oneself to exploring a rich vein of gaming goodness like that, but I think I'm a little too distracted by all the other opportunities and experiences offered in new games and rules. I have enjoyed Commands and Colors: Napoleonics every time it makes it to the table – I estimate T and I have played that game alone more than five hundred times now – but I like the new experiences and different periods as well. 

I suppose that's also what drives the need for new games, even when I have so many as yet unplayed. It's more than a simple desire of acquisition (though I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy obtaining and possessing new games, another aspect of the magpie instinct), but the exploration, the reveal, the chance to learn something I didn't know before. That last one is the most intoxicating.

I'd had intended to keep this to two parts, but I ran away a bit here, so next time I'll interrogate my pile of games through the lenses of Mode (more or less as per the new award categories included in the Charles S. Roberts Awards for 2023), and player-count. There's quite a bit to unpack there, so I'll try to keep the philosophical meanderings to a minimum.