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| "Our mission is to drop 112 tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs within a twenty-two mile radius of this building. We need a futile gesture at this point in the war." |
So, here were are at the end of March. I was
debating whether or not to keep posting quarterly progress reports, especially
since I’m only pursuing one personal gaming challenge this year, but I came
down on the side of keeping it going. It’s probably more for me than for the
viewers at home, but I find it gives me some perspective (which, conversely,
I’ve found very easy to lose if I don’t hold my self in some ways accountable).
I tend to be academically inclined in my pursuits; I started to teach myself to
play the guitar when I was about 14, and forty years later I’m still a much better
guitar historian and technician than a guitarist.
This year, I’m going to change it up a bit. I’m
going to report on a couple of new things, including tracking the number of
games I’ve played, instead of leaving it to a single figure for the year. I’ll
also be tracking some of the blog’s details. I’ll try to keep all of this short
and sharp, and maybe somebody else will find it momentarily diverting as well.
Or that might be asking too much. Still, if you’re not interested, you can just
skip this one. Vote with your feet. Or leave a comment about how you only come
here for the unboxings. Or whatever.
So, without further ado, here’s the new Quarterly Report
format. This may be subject to change, depending on how well it works, or adding
whatever I’ve forgotten to put in into the next one. IF there’s anything you’re
dying to know, leave a note in the comments.
Games played
Since last year I’ve been buying a week-to-a-page
diary at the beginning of the year and making a note of when I play a game
session or complete a game on Rally the Troops. I haven’t been making as much
use of Rally the Troops as I should. I tend to play a couple of turns a day,
rather than sitting down for a remote session. If anyone wants to hit me up for
a game and won’t mind it paying out over a week or so, send me an invitation
through Rally the Troops (user name: jonboywalton).
Even with an enforced convalescence for a few weeks
in late February and early March, I was disappointed to find I’d played less
than thirty games over the last three months. To be fair, some of our Wednesday
night games ran over two or three weeks – just recently it took us two weeks to
play a single five-player round of Successors, Fourth Edition (Phalanx, 2021), to a sudden death
victory by the usurper. We had at least a couple of games that spilled out over
a couple of sessions, but technically they’re the dame game, just carried over,
so these count as one each. Conversely, the Wednesday group played multiple
games over successive weeks of, say Undaunted 2200: Calisto (Osprey Games, 2024); each of these I counted as a
separate, discrete game.
In all, I played about 25 games over the last three
months. Those were spread over about fourteen titles. I played a half-dozen
games of Commands and Colors: Medieval – Crusades Expansion
(GMT Games, 2024) in fairly quick succession prepping
for the review. I managed a couple of
games on Rally the Troops (thank you, TH and MC).
Collection development
I’ve been tossing up how to report on new additions
to the collection. I was going to enumerate how many games I’ve bought I the
last three months, but that gets difficult quickly. I paid for a couple of
games last year, so do they count. Others I’ve bought or backed on crowdfunding
in the recent quarter may not show up until well into the second half of the
year.
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| First Quarter haul, in no particular order. I bought Operation Barkley as a filler with Stalingrad Roads, to make up the threshold for split payments. I wasn't going to get this one, even though I 'm a big fan of Maurice Suckling's games, but I think I'm glad I did. |
I’ve settled on counting what has shown up in the
first three months. This brings the count down to nine games; nine games
arrived this quarter (not so bad). I’ve paid for about another six games on top
of those, including three titles from GMT which, at time of writing, have yet
to reach Antipodean shores nearly three months after charging, and Carl Paradis’s Battle Commander, Volume 1 (Sound of Drums,
2025), which I backed on Gamefound. Come to think of it, there’s one more that
just snuck in under the wire – 1811: Albuera, 2nd Edition (Tactical Workshop, ~2025), also
on Gamefound, which was charged in the dying days of March; I’m an easy mark for
a new Napoleonics system.
Most of the games that have arrived, I bought second-hand,
though nearly half of these were still in their shrink-wrap, and a couple of
others had been opened and fondled but remained unpunched.
Blog activity
My posting output has slowed down a little after a
good month in January. This was partly due to the aforementioned illness,
partly to trying to spread myself too thinly across a couple of posts and not
completing any of them. I put up just sixteen posts over the last three months.
This is a lot compared to some of the other wargaming blogs I follow, but if
there’s one thing I’ve learnt it’s the secret to a contented life is not to
compare yourself to others. I have a target I’s like to reach of around two
posts a week. Thirteen is exactly one post a week. I’m pretty happy with what I
put up – I try not to post anything half-baked – but I think I can do better
quantitatively. I have before, and I’d like to get back to that. I’m going to
aim for three posts every two weeks for the second quarter. We’ll see how I’ve
done in three months’ time.
Of those thirteen posts, five were unboxings
(Stripped Down for Parts), four were After Action Reports (State of Play), three
were game reviews (I’m trying to lift my game here, so to speak). The remaining
three were the kind of introspective, navel-gazey twaddle I sometimes bore my
longsuffering readers with about the stuff around the actual games (By the
Numbers), plus a self-indulgent look at my rise from obscurity to
insignificance over last two years of A Fast Game, on its anniversary (31
January).
I’ve been winding back on the AARs lately. They’re
not as much work as a review but they’re not nothing. Sometimes I can knock one
out in the time it took to play the game, but more often it’ll take a couple of
days to put together something coherent and informative. And it can be discouraging
to put the work into something and get four or five views in the first six
months. But at the same time I’ve had a couple of people tell me they’ve gone
out an bought a game on the basis of a play report (I’ve never heard of anyone buying
a game because I gave it a good review).
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| I played a LOT of C&C Medieval - Crusades in this Quarter. |
Conversely, I went through a time of doing a lot of unboxings. Unboxings are the fast-food of the wargame-content ecosystem, both for creators and consumers. A recent discussion on Casus Belli FB group saw a groundswell of opposition (well, about fifteen or so respondents) to unboxings. It’s become a default for a lot of YouTubers because it’s very easy content to produce. Many won’t even edit the video. I like to think I bring a little more to the party; I do some research on the game and try to have some useful commentary, rather than just guessing at what this bit does.
When I started doing unboxing posts, I was a lot
fussier about which games I would give the treatment. After a while it was often
whatever as new to me. Going forward, I’ll still do them, but I’ll try to stick
to games that aren’t getting the coverage they deserve. And the just straight
out really pretty ones.
I am on track to do twelve reviews this year, but I’m
going to aim for fifteen. I’ve begun a review of Napoléon 1807 (Shakos, 2020), but it may not be the next one up. I’m
very keen to talk about my latest arrival, Drop Zone: Southern France (Worthington
Publishing, 2025), but I need to get a few plays in first. That I probably will
report on with an AAR.
Reviews are the hardest things to write, but that’s
mostly because I only want to spend the kind of time with a game that a review
requires (three to four games is a bare minimum), I really have to like it. I’d
rather ignore a game than give it a negative review, because the game I don’t
like is going to have a fan that may not try it if they read a negative review
from some blogger from the Antipodes. Better they find it for themselves.
Extra-curricular
activities
I’m making low progress on the War Room Ten Wargame Challenge, with two down and eight to go. Some of these I’m going to have to solo,
I think, which is fine. The next off the rank should be Drop Zone and Imperial Bayonets: We Were Not Cowards - Sedan, 1870 (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2020), though that may change. You can see the
full list at the above link. I’ve written AARs for the first to games, Napoleon,1807 and the Agincourt scenario from the Men of Iron Tri-Pack (GMT Games, 2020)
I’ve finally got around to starting Eurowargames (Nuts! Publishing.
2024). It arrived in late January, I think, but I was in the middle of This is
a collection of essays on the state and culture of wargaming in Europe from a
couple of different perspectives. I’m only a couple of essays in, but so far
each one has either contributed to my understanding of the field or made me
question what I thought I knew. It’s a solid collection with some well-known
contributors. I won’t be reviewing it here, because it’s not a wargame, but I
suspect I’ll be referencing it from time to time.
I’ve alluded to some other game-related stuff I’ve
been doing for a while now. Some of it has come to fruition (like Ray Weiss’s With the Hammer (Conflict Simulations
Ltd, (2025), which came out in January. Some is still ongoing. If all goes well,
I think I should be able to talk at more length about this by the next
quarterly report.
What’s next?
At this point my intention is to keep plugging away doing what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, but woth the aim of more such. I’ve got four posts I’m currently working on (including another review) in various states of incompletion. So, I have the next two or three weeks’ worth of posts in mind. I also have two unboxings I’d like to do among the games that arrived this quarter (David Meyler & Mike Rinella's Monty's Gamble: Market Garden, Second Edition (Multi-Man Publishing, 2019) isn't a new game, but it definitely warrants a look). I’ve been trying to get pickier about what games I write up for an unboxing, but I think these two deserve some attention.
I’ve been backing away from AARs on the blog, but I may try to ramp that up again. AARs feel a little like filler content. I always want to talk about how the game functions more than how that session played out, and I have to remind myself to bring it back to the situation and keep the mechanics for the review (and then actually write the review). I'm committed to writing AARs of the other eight Ten Game Challenge games I've yet to play, so there's that. There are also a couple of games on their way that I'll probably be eager to talk about, ahead of a review.
I also want to spend more time actually playing
games. A lot of normal game times didn’t get filled in the last three months
because of sickness or someone was out of town. In those instances, I really don’t
have an excuse not to get out a solo game, or spend the time pushing some
counters around in a new game I haven’t tabled yet. Its not merely lethargy at
play; as I said, I have been generally, vaguely unwell for the better part of
two months, with periodic exhaustion being one of the symptoms. But there were
times I chose to watch something instead of playing something.
So, that
about covers the first three months of 2025. I think writing this up has helped
put some things into focus for myself. I feel like I should have dome more this
quarter – more games, more posts- but I’m very happy with what I’ve played and
produced. And there’s always Q2.
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