2025 Q2 Report: Uphill Both Ways

 

 

The Capture of Hamel Village (probably the earliest successful combined arms
operations, incorporating infantry, armour, artillery and air support), July 4, 1918.
From the University Library Special Collections, University of Newcastle. 

 

And suddenly we’re half-way through the year, and what do I have to show for it? It’s been an a tough couple of months in some respects. Not a lot of gaming, but quite a bit of thinking about games and some actual work. On top of that, the Charles S. Roberts Awards nominations for 2024 were announced, voting opened and closed, and the winners posted, all inside of two months, which has to be some kind of record.

Over the last three months, I’ve been reading and thinking about wargames but not so much playing them. There are a couple of reasons for this, which I’ll get to in due course, but one big contributing factor was contracting COVID again at the beginning of May. This time, it hit me a little harder and for a couple of days longer than the first two times, but for roughly three weeks after I was clear of infection, I had a lingering brain fog that made prevented me from absorbing and recalling anything I read longer than a cake recipe. May was a very quiet, rather boring month.

Dawn's Early Light: the War of 1812. CDG goodness.

I did still manage to write some posts, though I didn’t end up completing two longer pieces that I’d hoped to get up this quarter (coming soon, hopefully). I did manage some coverage of the CSR Awards, and wrote up a couple of session reports and unboxings, for a total of seventeen posts for the quarter (counting this one).And I managed to get one more game ticked off my Ten Game Challenge list, bringing my up to a total of three games for the first six months of the year (well, technically five months, since we didn’t officially start ‘til around the end of January).

Spoiling for a fight: Saxons vs. late-Romans in Cumbria
(Lion Rampant, Second Edition).

 

Games played

Here is where I fell down a bit. I’ve played a total of eight physical games, all of these in April, as well as a couple of computer games. I played two miniatures games with the Wednesday group – a Late Roman vs Saxon game using the second edition Lion Rampant (Osprey Games, 2022), and an American Revolutionary War game (I fielded a brigade of Hessians in service of the Crown) using Perry Miniatures’ Valour & Fortitude rules (Perry Miniatures, 2022 – free for download here) for a clear victory and a hard-fought stalemate respectively. These were followed by our first highland excursion with Border Reivers (GMT Games, 2023), which was a lot of fun, even though it was clear by the second round that victory was a distant prospect for me. Since then, Wednesdays have been devoted exclusively to role-playing. Fun enough in and of itself, but not within the purview of this blog.

Colonials holding the line against two brigades of Redcoats and Hessians
(Valour & Fortitude).

I got one game ticked off my Ten Game Challenge list, Drop Zone: Southern France (Worthington Publishing, 2025 – unboxing post here) a solo run after T cancelled. I’d already set up the game after a two-turn run-through that afternoon. A week later we tried to tick off another Challenge game, Dawn’s Early Light: The War of 1812 (Compass Games, 2020). T hasn’t had a lot of experience with CDGs outside of Commands & Colors, and he arrived late on the night. We managed three turns of a nine-turn game. We planned to run through the full game the following week, but then came COVID (both of us, two weeks apart) then extensive work travel for T, so we haven’t caught up for a game in the last two months.

Drop Zone: Southern France.

I’m not at all prissy about playing a game on my own – I had every intention of pulling out Imperial Bayonets: We Were Not Cowards – Sedan 1870 (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2020), but the aforementioned brain fog stopped me from getting through a brush-up read of the rules, let alone setting the damn thing up. To be fair, other forces were also at work to delay that particular gratification. What energy and powers of concentration I was able to muster were funnelled into other channels. But I’ll get to that a little further into the report.

I did play some computer games. I’m not a big computer gamer, but bought the Steam rendition of Rebel Fury (GMT Games, 2024) the day it was available, and tried out the Fredericksburg scenario that night. And I did no better than I did any of the times I played it with the tabletop version. That is a tough gig.

The other computer game I played was Arete: The Battles of Alexander. This is a neat hex-and-counter game also available through Steam. I heard about the game nearing release when Ardy and Dan interviewed the game’s designer, Bill Kalapoglou on The Chit Show. Mr Kalapoglou has created a credible board wargame experience (with a CRT and everything) over eight scenarios, including a naval battle to take the island of Tyre. Arete is inexpensive and a joy to play, though my awful luck with dice has seemed to translate effectively to the digital realm.

 

Collection development

Q2 haul. I just realised I didn't mention my first Hollandspiel games. I'd given up on
ever finding a copy of Siege of Mantua, but someone on the Adelaide Wargamers
FB group was selling some titles, including Mantua, Stilicho and Aurelian (both
also on my wish-list). I haven't had the bandwidth to spend much time with any,
but I'm hoping to get Mantua to the table in the coming quarter.

I have pulled my horns in a bit lately on the games purchased front, with eight titles to show for my efforts. But I sprang for UPS delivery of my last GMT P500 order – By Swords & Bayonets (GMT Games 2025 – unboxing post here) and Battles of the American Revolution Tri-Pack II (GMT Games, 2025), so I would get them in a timely manner.

On that, those of us who ordered games in GMT’s big fourteen-title shipment in January should be receiving their booty within the next week or two. At time of writing, VR Distribution, when Australian end of the shipping process, is contacting people with orders to verify their delivery addresses. If my delivery arrives before the end of June, I’ll amend this post with a note at the bottom.

All Are Brothers: Solforino, 1859 (Legion Wargames, 2025 – unboxing post available here) came up as available in early April. It’s a game about the pivotal battle of the Wars of Italian Unification and a crucial moment in history in several respects. It’s by a first-time designer, Bryan Armor, and uses the popular Blind Swords system, more commonly found in Revolution Games’ ACW games, but also in Hermann Luttmann’s At Any Cost: Metz, 1870 (GMT Games, 2018 - a reprint is currently looking for more orders on the P500 list).

As a rule, Legion don’t take your money until a finished game is in their hands. At that time, the Legion folks will send an email to everyone who preregistered for a copy to say it’s available. I really respect this model of doing business and do my best to grab the games as soon as I can. The first game I’d ordered on CPO, Skyhawk (Legion Wargames, 2022), became available, I wrote to the company and apologised, saying I couldn’t afford to grab it for another couple of weeks. Randy wrote back, saying it was fine, and if the price had gone up to retail on the website, to let him know and he’d make sure I got it for the preorder price. Legion Wargames is a class act.

Sometimes the situation dictates the purchase. Over dinner with friends, D – the husband – started quizzing me about games. They have a smart eight-year-old with a developing interest in finding new games at which to beat his father. I didn’t think of it at the time, a couple of days later I thought one of my favourite racing games, Odin’s Ravens (Osprey Games, 2016) would be perfect; a short play time and ruthless tactics for a solid game experience. So, I went shopping.

Odin’s Ravens usually sells around the $35.00 mark, and I found a copy a little cheaper at an interstate store. I’m not a penny-pincher, but I didn’t want to pay ten dollars shipping for just one game when I could get two for the same flat rate, and if I made the sale up to $100.00, I cold split it over four payments. This is how I came to (finally) getting Port Arthur (Nuts! Publishing, 2024 – you can see what’s inside the clamshell box here) and 1212 Las Navasde Tolosa (Draco Ideas, 2022 – unboxing forthcoming). Both look like fast-playing and  engaging small footprint games, so expect at least an AAR for each when I get to them.

 

Blog activity

This Quarterly Report marks my 200^th post for A Fast Game. Starting out, I naively thought I’d be able to maintain an output of around two-to-three posts a week. But that was when I was young and full of hope. This quarter, I’ve lagged a little due to sickness; this was our third round of COVID, and I think I had it for at least three days before I tested positive. Jess got on to anti-virals as soon as she tested positive, but I was too far along for them to be efficacious, so I braved it out. After a week I tested negative, but I maintained a cough, intermittent congestion and a lingering brain fog for nearly a month, which took its toll on both gaming and content output.

I still had a more productive quarter than Q1 – seventeen posts compared to thirteen in January through March – but still sluggish. My output has been slower in 2025 compared to the previous two years, and I’m not meeting even my revised-down my target for reviews (and don’t get me started on my Ten Game Challenge performance; I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet, but I had hoped to reach half-way by, well, half-way).

I must be doing something right though. Folks are still visiting A Fast Game for their half-baked notions and poorly lit in-play game photos. At the beginning of June, I posted (rather self-indulgently) that my review of Commands & Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010) had surpassed 500 views, and the blog overall had just passed 30,000 page visits. As of a couple of days ago, that number has surpassed 36,000.* So, thank you to everyone showing up to see what’s new. It helps to keep me motivated.

 

Extra-curricular activities

To be fair, I haven’t merely been convalescing over the last three months. In my last Quarterly Report, I alluded to a couple of different things on the go. I can mention one of those things here as it’s out in the public domain now.

AAK Cover. Rommel looked a lot older by the time he left North Africa.

I’ve written about playtesting a couple of games for Conflict Simulations Ltd in previous posts. When I put up my hand for Great Northern War (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2024), designer Ray Weiss was struggling to find people to playtest another of his games in development, Afrika Army Korps (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2025). AAK covers the entire North African theatre, from Casablanca to El Alamein across a set of eight interconnected maps (six 17” by 22” and two 11” by 17”). It’s hard to get people to commit to testing a game of such scope – development on 1916: Romania – Prelude to Blitzkrieg (Vuca Simulations, ~2026) has stalled due to a lack of play-testers willing to commit to such an expansive game.

After Great Northern War had been released, Mr Weiss was still in need of play-testers, so I gave in and said I'd take it on. I’d placed an order with CSL for a handful of games, so Mr Weiss added a set of maps and counters to the order, which eventually made its way to Australia, and gave me access to the electronic files for the rules and other materials. So, I got to it.

This is the entire AAK map, laid out (in three sections) on my wife's cutting out table.
The left-side maps cover El-Amiriya (just west of Alexandria) to Tripoli, and the
right-side maps run from Casablanca to Zuwärah, just inside the Libyan border. 
The Early War scenario will play out on the maps on the left. Using some delayed
entry rules, we managed to get the Torch to Tunisia scenario down to
the five maps on the right. 

The game as I received it had three scenarios; The Early War, Torch to Tunisia (covering the Anglo-American invasion of Vichy-held Morocco and Algeria through to the historical end of the campaign), and the appropriately titled Campaign for North Africa, the last two of these taking all eight maps. The Early War could be played on the eastern-most three maps (a lazy 66” in width, but manageable), but the full set-up for the late war scenario and the campaign comes out to about 11’ 6” (nearly 3.5 meters) in length. It’s a daunting prospect. I’ve had the maps set up in completion a couple of times, but it requires splitting it into three parts on separate sides of my wife’s sewing table – manageable but unruly. I confess, I haven’t played the entire campaign. But I played through the Early War and most of Torch to Tunisia.

AAK box-back, showing the set-up of the maps.

I had the idea of preparing a couple of historical scenarios of set-piece battles. I put together a scenario covering Operation Compass, playable on just the two eastern-most maps, and complete with printable scenario sheets for tracking the damage to units. I presented it to Mr Weiss as a fait accompli. It was tested and generally liked by the other play-tester still working on the game, who had some (helpful) notes. I also developed two training scenarios, one of them solitaire, for new players to get a handle on DAMOS, and these were rolled into the scenario package. I was working on another early historical scenario, Brevity to Battleaxe, but ran out of time for it to be included in the package (I’m hoping to get it together soon and post it as a downloadable file on BGG, and to follow it up with some other scenarios).

Mr Weiss liked the scenario sheet model, and asked if I would the other scenarios the same treatment. These are what now comes in the last section of the rulebook, and pdf copies of the scenario sheets should be downloadable from the Afrika Army Korps page on Boardgamegeek within a couple of weeks.

I have a long-ish piece I’m working on going into how AAK plays and what I see as the strengths of the DAMOS system. I’ve been a little evangelical about the game; I'm sure it won’t be for everyone, and it’s an investment. But I think AAK will become a convention favourite for the size and scope of the game. I think of it as CfNA-lite. I don’t know of another game that will let you play out the entire North African campaign over about two solid days of table-time.

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That’s all I can talk about for now. The other thing is still a little up in the air, so I don’t want to jinx it.

And that’s my second quarter for 2025. Going into writing this, I really didn’t feel like I'd got all that much done. But in spite of sickness and cancellations, I’ve actually been pretty busy after all. Maybe in Q3 I’ll be able to get back to playing some games.

 

* June 2025 has been my highest visit month in the whole nearly two and a half years of A Fast Game, with 6,470 hits at time of writing. I had a better than average month in April with 3,030 visits, but the June quota comes to more than the totals for April and May put together. Again, thank you to all the readers who check in on a regular basis. I'll try to keep it interesting.