2024 Q4 Report: Focussing on the Positive

  

For a more complete picture of how the year panned out, I'll refer you to my previous reports for Q1, Q2, and Q3.

 

At the beginning of the year, I made some bold claims about what I hoped to achieve this year at A Fast Game. But that was twelve months ago, when I was young and full of hope, dreams and big ideas. Since than we’ve been through another bout of COVID and sundry other maladies, a bereavement in the family, and a score of other outside forces indifferent to my wish to play and write about wargames.

If you look over the last three Quarterly Report, you’ll see a growing sense of my inability to meet the goals I’d set myself. I’m not beating myself up too much about these shortcomings. After nearly a year of writing A Fast Game, I just didn’t anticipate 2024 being so difficult, and not just for me but nearly everyone around me as well. So, the tone of this post is one of an underlying resignation.

The anniversary of my second year writing A Fast Game will be January 31 next year (nearly this year, now). I’ll talk about all my unmet goals and missed opportunities and the ramifications of those disappointments closer to that date. I’ve also talked about the year’s gaming numbers in an earlier post. I’ll revisit some overall numbers in my anniversary post in a month. I’m not going to rehash all the things that led me to not meeting any of my stated goals – I’ve already spilt too many pixels on that. Here instead, to finish the calendar year on a high note, I’d like to spend some time reflecting on what games I enjoyed the most and what ones surprised me. 

If I could change one thing about the game, it would probably be a slightly stronger
colour-tone variation between the Union and CSA forces. Just being picky here.

Rebel Fury: Battles of the American Civil War (GMT Games, 2024)

I’ve never got to play Mark Hermann’s Gettysburg (RMB Studio, 2018) that appeared in C3i Magazine and was subsequently released as a standalone game. I’d heard about the intention of the game and it sounded interesting, but I was keener to try Mr Herman’s follow-up, Waterloo Campaign, 1815 (RMB Studio, 2019) which came out in the very next C3i issue.

I think I was about order no. 140-something when Rebel Fury hit the P500 list on the GMT website. I am committed to learning the Great Battles of the American Civil War system, and have a couple of titles in that series (all of which at this stage remain unpunched), and I’m intrigued by the Great Campaigns series, though it’s a big outlay for an untried game when you build in shipping costs and a tanking Australian dollar (great for exports, not so much for wargamers), but I really wanted a game that would let me play out a significant battle on a single map in a relatively short time span (like a couple of hours on a weekday evening). Rebel Fury seemed to fit those requirements, on paper at least.

When I received the game and started to dig into it, I was floored. It’s high-level – infantry and cavalry divisions, with much smaller ad hoc detachments – and artillery is somewhat abstracted in the game; these are two things that a lot of folks don’t like in their ACW games. But Rebel Fury does what it sets out to do, shifting the focus from combat to manoeuvre, which is arguably where the best commanders in the conflict excelled, and it does it well. Rebel Fury is a very fast playing (once you get the hang of it) game that really does let you fight the Battles of Spotsylvania or Chattanooga in an evening. 

Put on the spot, I nominated Rebel Fury as my favourite game of 2024 in the Armchair Dragoons Year End Wargaming Survey (which at the time of publication, was still open, and I would encourage anyone who hasn’t yet participated to do so). On reflection, I think I would stand by that assessment. On top of an innovative and fast-playing system, there are six separate scenarios in the box, two battles to a map. Rebel Fury represents real value for money.

So. Much. Game.

300: Earth & Water (Nuts! Publishing, 2020)

This game was a revelation. So much deep strategic goodness in such a small package. Maybe it’s something about the Greek theme; Agamemnon (Osprey Games, 2016) has a similar vibe, only much more dream-like (and much more of a puzzle game), where 300 is firmly rooted in the history of the situation. For the full rundown, take a look at my review.

All the Conquerors series games have exceptional components and gorgeous maps.

Napoléon 1807 (Shakos, 2020)

I was already a fan of Napoléon1806 (Shakos, 2019 – you can read my review here), so mechanically I wasn’t confronted with too many new rules or moving parts in Napoléon 1807. But – no to take away from its predecessor – Napoléon 1807 offers so much more. Firstly, the map is 50% larger than Napoléon 1806 (36” by 24”), and where the original game had just two scenarios (the campaign scenario and a three-turn introduction), Napoléon 1807 offers twelve scenarios, plus a thirteenth to fold the first game into the second.

I cannot say enough good things about the Conquerors series mechanics. There’s the over-riding conflict with your opponent, but both players are playing against the exhaustion of their own units and the rapidly diminishing number of turns available to achieve what you need to win.

I’m part way through penning a review of Napoléon 1807, but I just want to play it a couple of times more before I finish and post it, so bear with me. A while ago, I grabbed the last copy of Napoléon 1815 (Shakos, 2022) that Hexasim had in stock, although I think it’s back in print again. I’m waiting for an opportunity to play it three-player; that may happen later in the year, fingers crossed.

Blocks. Lots of blocks.

Commands and Colors: Medieval (GMT Games, 2019)

This was a revisitation rather than a new experience. Don’t get me wrong, I always liked C&C: Medieval, but it was never my favourite. T and I played it a lot when it first arrived but slipped back into the more familiar Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010) after a couple of months. I wanted to write a review of C&C: Medieval when the Crusades Expansion (GMT Games, 2024) was getting close to release, so I got T to play it again with me about four or five times.

Every C&C game has its own character and its own rhythm, and C&C: Medieval is no different. Except it’s quite different. It’s different from its closest comparison game, Commandsand Colors: Ancients (GMT Games, 2006); combat in Medieval tends to be less structured and a lot more dynamic, with a much greater reliance on cavalry units to harass the opponent’s flanks or to shatter a weak centre. The use of Inspired Leader tokens with tailored sets of orders for each side also helps to provide a level of verisimilitude to each game, and adds a sense of player agency that can sometimes feel diminished with a few unlucky dice rolls in a row. It’s rare a given order will win you the game, but a well-timed bit of inspiration may put a thumb on the balance and set you in a better position for a favourable outcome.

I don’t think I would be overstating it to say rediscovering C&C Medieval has brought back some of the magic I felt when I first began playing Command and Colors fourteen years ago. With the onslaught of Christmas and all that entails, we haven’t had a chance to play the Crusades expansion yet, but I’m hoping to post a review by the end of January.

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So, there are four games that had an outsized impact on me this year. There were others, of course. I just recently played Samurai Swords (Milton Bradley, 1986) for the first time and was amazed how strategically deep a commercially made and distributed game could be.

Another game that blew me away was Saigon 75 (Nuts! Publishing, 2023), a short, brutal game about the last years of the American War in Vietnam. I’ve only played it once so far, but with a few more losses (and some therapy sessions) I’ll bring you a review. If the subject doesn’t excite you, designers Jean-Phillippe Barcus and Pascal Toupy ported the system to Revolutionary France with Vendée 93 (Brotherhood of Simulations, ~2025), set in the aftermath of the execution of Louis XVI. The system is taut and grinding, a really intense 50-or-so minutes of immersive gaming.

Things get bleak for the ARVN player very quickly.

As for the future, I’m looking forward to (finally) tabling A Most Fearful Sacrifice: The Three Days of Gettysburg (Flying Pig Games, 2022), every opportunity to do so in 2024 having eluded me. I’m also looking forward to revisiting Napoléon 1807 and Rebel Fury, and hopefully some neglected acquisitions like Imperial Tide: The Great War, 1914-1918 (Compass Games, 2022) and Coalition: The Napoleonic Wars, 1805-1815 (Compass Games, 2021), to name just two. The parlous state of the Australian dollar means I’ll have to be more circumspect about buying new games, but the happy knock-on effect of that will be having the capacity to spend time with some games I already own.

So, the plan is to continue what I’m doing, and hope people will still show up and have a read (maybe leave a comment), and maybe learn something or be inspired to try something they haven’t before. So, thank you most sincerely for reading this far, and Happy New Year. And I hope you’ll visit again in 2025.