A Fast Game’s Second Anniversary – Looking back, looking forward

  

The 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras - Elizabeth Thompson (later Lady William Butler).
The original hangs in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and it really
quite impressive; it's over 2.1 meters (85 inches) across. This facsimile
doesn't do the painting justice.

 

 Note: If you're a regular visitor to this page, You willl have noticed I haven’t posted anything in over a week. I’ve been putting my time into helping out with another project that I can't I can go into at the moment (though I've alluded to it before), which has taken up the majority of my spare time, but I think will be worth the effort. Normal transmission should return shortly (within a week or so), but I had to take some time out from the other thing to note this blog’s birthday. Thanks for reading, and for sticking around.

 

Today marks the second anniversary of A Fast Game. That in itself feels like something of an accomplishment. The blog has evolved over the last two years; it began as a form of self-accountability and has grown into by turns a forum for airing ideas about wargames, a fan page for games I’ve enjoyed and want to tell others about, and occasionally a spleen to vent. It’s been a ride, but it’s been fun. But how did we get here?

In 2022, I was feeling a little dissolute, cast adrift. I don’t want to dwell on that, but, coing off the dull terror of COVID, I felt like I was going through the motions, barely showing up in some of areas in my life, including with gaming. It came to a head in the second half of 2022.

I’ve wrestled with – I don’t want to say depression because I think that takes away from the acute depth other folks’ experience of depression – I’ll call it “the glums” for much of my adult life. Not all the time, but periodically. This was happening around the same time; I couldn’t say if it was the cause of the adrift feeling or a product of it. It’s never too serious or debilitating, and eventually I realise what’s going on and I manage to snap myself out of it or look for the tunnel with the light at the end of it.

There are always things you can’t exert any control over, and others that you can. I’ve become better at recognising one from the other, and I’ve found that working on the ones you can influence is a good way to push through the glums. I realised one of the things that was weighing me down was my game collection. I had a lot of games that I’d punched, read through, maybe even pushed a few counters around to get a feel of play, but never actually played. I identified something I could do something about, so I grabbed a shovel.

I’m a spreadsheet guy, and so I made a list of the games I owned and marked off the ones I’d played. At that time, I had I had around 220 or so games all up, mostly wargames or games that involved some kind of economic conflict. I left the RPGs out of the equation. I typed up all the titles and put a tick next to the ones I’d played at least once. The result was around 19.5% played. If I incorporated the expansions for games like Combat Commander (GMT Games, 2006), Band of Brothers (Worthington Publishing, 2011), and the Commands and Colors expansions, the result nudged up to a little under 22%. SO I'd barely played one in five games I owned, even just once. This, I decided, was something I could do something about.

I decided to find a way of making myself play more games. I’ve written before about hearing about the War Room’s Ten by Ten challenge for 2022 around the same time, and how I misinterpreted the “10x10” to be ten games, played ten times each. I didn’t think I could pull that off, so I settled from a more manageable 6x6 challenge for myself. I picked six games, and declared to my gaming buddies that I was going to try to play them six times each. I had a plan.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised if I was going to stick it out and actually see out the plan, I needed some kind of mechanism of accountability. I blogged when I was at university, then when I was working in the same university. I had form, and I had a preexisting Blogger account (I thought about using Wordpress for broader exposure, but didn’t want to commit to paying for something I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep up). My first post talked about why I was starting a blog (a longwinded version of some of the above). The sixth post announced I was changing one of the games in my 6x6 list, because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get another two players together six separate times for Churchill (GMT Games, 2015), and settled on Undaunted: Normandy (Osprey Games, 2019).

By the end of the year, I had failed my self-set challenge, completing six plays of only two of the games, but A Fast Game had taken on a life of its own. I posted reviews twelve games by the end of 2023, written dozens of session-AARs, delved – however shallowly – into the philosophy and psychology of wargames, and generally had a lot of fun, both gaming and writing.

In 2024 I played around forty games I hadn’t played before. I don’t know if I would have got to that number if I hadn’t been writing A Fast Game. Blogging is easier than maintaining a YouTube channel because there’s a lot less outside pressure to produce new content every week (honestly, I don’t know how Grant from The Player’s Aid manages to contribute to both the channel and their blog).

For me, A Fast Game is a creative outlet, and a way to give back to the hobby and the community that’s given so much back (including kind messages from a handful of designers and artists for my generally positive reviews of their work). 2024 was tough on me and my family, but the blog – and the positive feedback from readers – has helped me tunnel out of the dark.

This is a sample of the (rather superficial) analytical data I can access regarding
A Fast Game. For what it's worth, the blog isn't in any way monetised. And I'll
mention again, I don't accept review copies of games or any other free stuff.
Not that anyone has been offering.

I’m not obsessive about numbers. Not normally. But I was coming up to a milestone of sorts at the end of 2024, and so I’ve been monitoring views of A Fast Game over the last month or so, and I can repost that a couple of weeks ago the blog hit 20,000 views. This is a long way from The Player’s Aid blog, which reported over 4.8 million views in their eighth anniversary post back in April last year, but it brought me a little joy in a way that arbitrary numbers sometimes do.

Speaking of numbers, this will be my 174^th post to A Fast Game. This time last year I had hoped to reach 200 posts now, but life and other projects intervened. I’m okay with that. Well. I’m not okay with going more than a week without posting anything – I try to put up two or three posts a week, but that’s been difficult in the last eight or ten months. I don’t think I need to apologise for the breaks in transmission, but I do think I’ll be turning a corner soon, getting back to a more regular schedule.

One of the four Ten Game Challenge games, I've played before and am eager
to get back to: Rebel Fury (GMT Games, 2024).

For the year ahead, I’ve only made one commitment. I’ve come full circle and have pledged to complete this year’s War Room Ten Game Challenge (having a clearer understanding this time of what is involved). This year, the Challenge is to play ten games out of a selection of twelve (ten primaries, with two subs in case something prevents you from nailing all the first ten – you can find my list here). This I think I can do, as it works out to be less than one game a month. Having said that, I‘ve yet to play my first, while some of my Brothers in Challenge are moving on to their fourth already. I’m not panicking yet, but I need to move on it. I’m hoping to get my first to the table in the next day or two and post an AAR early next week.

I posted ten game reviews in 2024, but I had aimed to get twenty up. I’d like to lift my game on reviews this year, maybe twelve or fifteen, but these are the hardest posts to write; they require serious consideration, more editing than other posts, and I try to get some original photographs to illustrate the post. Also, I will only post a game review if I’ve played it at least three times. I wanted to get a review up of the Crusades Expansion (GMT Games, 2024 - not the proper name, but that's what everyone thinks of it as) for Commands and Colors: Medieval (GMT Games, 2019), but with four plays now, I still feel I’ve barely scratched the surface. I’m going to have to skip to the last third of the scenarios and play another three or four scenarios with the Knights Orders to really get into the marrow of the game before I’m comfortable taking about it.

The trap is sprung: Hab, 1119 (C & C Medieval Expansion 1:
Crusades Mid-Eastern Battles 1).

I’m not planning on getting too funky with A Fast Game. Along with reviews, I’ll still post Session AARs (for the interesting games, at least) and unboxings, which are about even with reviews for popularity. So a reliable more-of-the-same, which the occasional drop down a rabbit hole, as the whim takes me.

So, if you’re new, welcome to the blog; if you’re an old hand, welcome back. I’ll try to keep it interesting and at least sometimes funny. I’ll also try to be positive – I’m not going to waste my time or your attention on something I don’t like. If I’m talking about a game here, it will be because I see some value in it. Your opinion may differ, and that’s okay. Keep reading and we’ll probably find some common ground.

I'm tremendously grateful for the restorative effects of maintaining A Fast Game, and for the readers that regularly visit the page and lend me the impetus to keep it up. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading to the end. You can stop now, but come back again from time to time.