By the Numbers: What I did in 2024

So, here’s a breakdown of how I spent my year, game-wise. This will be a shorter post, because – in part at least – I didn’t do as much this year, though n some ways I suppose I dd a lot. I did a lot of non-gaming stuff, but that’s not what we’re here for, so that leaves less game stuff to sift through. So, let’s get sifting.

 

Games purchased

I’ve never stopped to think about how many games I‘ve bought in a single year, let alone their provenance, but I’m starting to this year. I’m not expecting any deliveries this side of New Year’s Day, so I think I can safely say. For convenience and sanity, I’ll take the day of receipt as the point a game enters the library, rather than the day I paid for it. IT will be easier to track that way.

I can report that in 2024 I received 34 wargames. This number should be higher – as mentioned in a previous post, I was the victim of a porch piracy incident when somebody stole a just-delivered copy of Imperial Bayonets: Solferino 1859: For Liberty & Lombardy (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2024) from our enclosed courtyard. This was one of the titles I’d been looking forward to most keenly this year.

I do have Solerino's sister game, IB: Sedan 1870, but I really want to explore
the Wars of Italian Unification.

There was one other game that might have made the list, but I didn’t feel like it warranted the status of “wargame,” The Plum Island Horror (GMT Games, 2023). I managed to nab a copy (and a copy of another game which did make the wargame bracket, I, Napoleon (GMT Games, 2024) before they both sold out) through rueful and expeditious ordering at the very beginning of GMT’s Fall Sale, earlier this year (you can read about my complete Fall Sale haul here). I’ll still bring some A Fast Game love to Plum Island Horror in the new year, but for the sake of this list, I can’t call it a wargame.

So, 35 games, but one MIA and one disqualified. But where did they come from?

There was a fairly even split among the 35 games bought. Nineteen were bought new, and the remaining fourteen were second-hand. Of the nineteen new games, thirteen were bought directly from the publisher (just one, A Most Fearful Sacrifice, Second Edition, via Kickstarter), and the other seven from secondary sellers. The other publisher-direct games this year all came from GMT Games and Conflict Simulations Ltd. This is unusual; last year I bought five or six games directly from Compass Games, and I this must be the first year I haven’t bought a couple of games from Worthington or Legion. I use the term “secondary sellers” loosely. I sourced new games from a couple of dedicated game stores (Milsims and Gameology), at least two from The Nile (for our overseas readers, an online bookstore roughly analogous to Barnes and Noble), and the remainder from purveyors of new stock on eBay. The one thing all these sellers have in common is the availability of split-payment options like Afterpay, which allow you to break the cost of an item down into fortnightly payments over six weeks.

Napoléon 1807 (Shakos, 2020); another game I'm looking forward to
spending more time with.

It’s rare that I have a few hundred dollars to spend and no preorders on the way, but on the couple of occasions I did I did, I blew it all at The War Library, which account for nine of my second-hand game purchases. The remaining five were all sourced from eBay. I realise now that for the first time in a number of years, I’ve gone a whole calendar year without ordering anything from Noble Knight Games. This isn’t an indictement, merely an observation. Though I suppose global shipping increases have played a part in that.

Interestingly, of the fifteen second-hand games bought, thirteen were unpunched (of those, four were still in their shrink-wrap). Again, just an observation.

 

Games played

It feels like forces and circumstance have conspired to keep me from the table tis year. Some of that has been unavoidable, and some was of my own making. Having said that, I’m surprised by the number of new games I’ve played this year, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

I’m in the fortunate position of having two routine game commitments a week. Well, when I say regular, one is fairly regular, while the other is a little more haphazard.

As of last March, I’ve been meeting with friends for a regular Wednesday night game session for seventeen years. The group had been meeting for some time before I came along, but of the folks who were a part of it when I joined, only two of us remain. The other is B, our host.

When I joined the group, we played RPGs pretty much exclusively. In my time with the Wednesday group we’ve seen a churn of over a dozen different members come and gone. This has settled in the last few years, in that time we’ve reached a kind of equilibrium between role-playing, historical miniatures (as witnessed from time to time on this blog) and boardgames (some of which fit under the umbrella of wargames, others, not so much).

This year we played (rather, I made it to) 43 weeks out of 52. The breakdown of games played is as follows:

Of the boardgames played, four were more or less historically-based wargames, and all were new to me. I finally got to play Andean Abyss (GMT Games, 2012), and Pandemic: Fall of Rome (Z-Man Games, 2018), as well as two older games; a Martin Wallace game, Empires of the Ancient World (Warfrog Games, 2000), and Samurai Swords (Milton Bradley. 1988).

Samurai Swords (known in later editions as Shogun, and Ikusa) in all
it's colour-saturated glory.

Monday night games have dropped off this year. My brother-in-law, T and I have both had a lot going on, as well as mutual family stuff, but it’s had an impact. This year we’ve met for a game 33 times, a little less than two weeks in three. I’m grateful for the nights we do get to have a game – T has been an unofficial play-tester on two games this year (I’ll swing back to the playtesting thing later), and one week we spent stickering up T’s copy of Commands and Colors: Medieval (GMT Games, 2019) when I wanted to spend some time replaying the game while writing up a review; neither of us had realised we’d only ever played my copy.

All up, we managed to put in eighteen different games, ten of which were new to the both of us, while still managing to squeeze in a healthy dose of Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010). We even began the year with Austerlitz and Vimiero, the to Grande Battle (extra large) scenarios from the EPIC Napoleonics expansion (GMT Games, 2016).

Rebel Fury (GMT Games, 2024), one of my favourite games this year. I want to play it
a few more times before I write a review, but its a lot of fun.

I also played eight out-of-session games against an opponent in 2024. four of these were with B from the Wednesday group (including a one-on-one game of Lasalle (Sam Mustafa Publishing, 2021). Three of these were online games via Rally the Troops, with Tom and Morris from the Adelaide Wargamers FB group. The game was Washington’s War (GMT Games, 2010 – a game I’ve owned in hardcopy for some years but never got to playing it. Three games (and three losses) have taught me a lot, both about the game and using RTT as a resource, and I’m very keen to play more games this way in 2025.

 

Extra-curricular activities

All up, I played 23 games for the first time this year, but al of them new, and of all of them mine. This is down on last year but about eight games, but there are three more games to add to the list, which doesn’t make it seem quite so bad (and goes some way to explaining the shortfall). I have playtested/am currently playtesting three titles this year, all for Conflict Simulations Ltd; The Great Northern War (CSL, 2024), Army Afrika Korps (CSL, ~2025), and With the Hammer: Thomas Müntzer and the German Peasants War in Thuringia (CSL, ~2025), so I guess the real number is 25 new games – you just can’t get two of them yet (at time of posting).

I’ve written about all three previously (check the subject links to the right of this post if you’re interested) and have one more post each slated for AAK and With the Hammer to come in the next few weeks. Playtesting takes an inordinate amount of time and bandwidth, and it’s one of the reasons for not playing (or writing) as often this year as last.

Home-crafted With the Hammer playtest set. Normal people would just use TTS.

Aside from the playtesting, it’s just been a shitty year with its own difficulties, which in turn impacted on your correspondent’s gaming life. I’d like to say next year will be different, but who can say. I didn’t hit any of my stated targets for 2024 – I’ll address these shortfalls in another post – but all things considered, I’ve had a better year of it than I expected.

 

What’s next

I also have some things to look forward to in the coming year. Dan Fournie’s Drop Zone: Southern France (Worthington Publishing, ~2025), had a successful Kickstarter campaign with Worthington this year, and should be shipping in the first half of 2025. Ditto Hermann Luttmann’s Rock of Chickamauga (Flying Pig Games, ~2025), the second game in the Black Swan system – the late pledge for which is still open on Backerkit for a couple more weeks at time of writing. Congress of Vienna (GMT Games, ~2025), the latest game in the Great Statesmen series, will be charging in January, and the Deluxe edition of Fields of Fire (GMT Games, ~2025) the following month. And in the meantime I’ve got a few unplayed games to keep me amused (and some more hours of playtesting); I'm really looing forward to getting Fallen Eagles II (Hexasim, 2022) to the table (you can see why here).

So, here’s to the year that was, for what it’s worth. And to better days.

I promise I'll at least post an  unboxing of A Most Fearful Sacrifice before
Rock of Chickamauga arrives.