2025 Q3 Report: the loneliness of the long-distance blogger

 

The art of the long view (Artillery forward observer, Guadalcanal, 1942). 

 

You can also check out my previous activities for 2025 in the Quarterly Reports for Q1 and Q2, if you really have nothing better to do with your time.

 

And suddenly here we are at the end of September (at time of writing) so. three-quarters of the way through the year, it’s time to look back, evaluate and remonstrate in a Quarterly Report. This is the third for the calendar year; long-term readers will be familiar with the format, and I’m confident new visitors will be able to work it out as they go, so I’ll skip the long preamble and get to it.

 

Games played

I have two “regular” game nights in a given week, Mondays with my brother-in-law who I refer to as T, and Wednesday, which has been a thing now for eighteen years. I put inverted commas around regular because, in the words of Yogi Berra, “In theory, there’s no difference between Theory and Practice, but in practice, there is.”

Congestion on the Club Route; WWII Commander - Market Garden.

Last year, the Wednesday group got quite a few wargames – some boardgames, some miniatures - in among the occasional Role-Playing Game. In the last couple of years we’ve been doing a tour of the classics, getting Here I Stand (GMT Games, 2006), Republic of Rome (Avalon Hill, 1990), Successors (Fourth Ed. - Phalanx, 2021) and Empires of the Ancient World (Warfrog, 2000). This year, the roles have reversed (no pun intended), and RPGs are the order of the day, punctuated with (usually) a couple of weeks of historical minis. On this front, we got some table time with some English Civil War action using the Pikeman’s Lament (Osprey Games, 2017). I really quite like these rules; they are simple enough to pick up at the table, and don’t get too fussy regarding manoeuvre. A given unit roll a handful of dice in attack until its reduced to half strength, then the dice are halved. Two games played as the Royalists, the first convincingly won, the second comprehensively lost, but a lot of fun both times.

As mentioned, all the other weeks were taken up with role-playing. In early July we finished up a game of Cartel (Magpie Games, 2020). We went on to Daggerheart (Darrington Press, 2025) for about seven sessions, and the last couple of weeks we’ve been playing Mothership 1E (Tuesday Knight Games, 2024). Variety is the spice of life, so I’m told.

C&C Medieval: the Crusades - Battle of Harran set-up, with Claude. He is clumsy
 of tail and dismissive of games generally, but very affectionate,
and likes nothing more than sitting on PACs.

As for Monday (sometimes Tuesday) Night games, we managed six games out of twelve weeks, a little better than I had anticipated. Most of the off-weeks were from T being overseas, either recreationally or with work. We’ve played a lot of scenarios from the Crusades Expansion (GMT Games, 2024) for Commands & Colors: Medieval (GMT Games, 2019) this year, three just this quarter. I also managed to get three other games (two which only arrived this quarter). Here’s the short list, with accompanying write-ups:

- Dawn’s Early Light: the War of 1812 (Compass Games, 2020) (Ten Game Challenge AAR)

- C&C: M (C) – Ascalon AAR, Harran ARR, Tel Danith (AAR forthcoming)

- WWII Commander, Vol. 2: Market Garden (Compass Games, 2025) (unboxing; AAR)

- Breizh 1341 (Shakos, 2022) (unboxing; AAR)

I feel like I’ve stalled at four games ticked off my Ten Wargame Challenge list. The War Room, the YouTube program that has run variations on a Ten Game Challenge for the last four or five years. At the beginning of this year, people were invited to submit a list of ten games they intended to play, along with two substitute titles they could swap out for games in the main list. I posted my list here, and on idjester’s Tac-Up Facebook group; Jester kept log of everyone’s submissions and ticked off the games when we would post proof of play – photos or an AAR – to the group.

Mike's experiment in Democracy

Recently the show was disbanded, and I haven’t heard anything conclusive about the future of the Challenge. Meandering Mike (who hosts one of my favourite YouTube channels - go subscribe if you haven't already - I'll wait) posted a survey for his viewers regarding whether he should proceed with his list. I voted in the “finish the complete list” camp, so I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t at least make an effort to finish mine. I have four down, with another six to go. I may get it done, but if I don’t complete ten games total, I should be able to squeeze in another three or four at least. I’m resigned to playing most or all of whatever I get done on my own, with the possible exceptions of Panzer Battles: 11th Panzer on the Chir River (Multi-Man Publishing, 2016), Waterloo, 1815: Fallen Eagles II (Hexasim, 2022), and possibly A Most Fearful Sacrifice: the Three Days of Gettysburg (Flying Pig Games, 2022).

 

Collection development

I have been trying to wind back the number of games I’ve been buying, but the actual numbers suggest otherwise. This quarter saw the collection grow nearly as much as the last two combined. Some of this was from games I’d already paid for; a number of crowd-funded games arrive, as well as some preorders. I have been deciding against buying some games, or postponing purchases, but I’ve also been picking up some titles on the second-hand market. The fact is, I’ve received nearly as many games in the first three quarters of 2025 as I did in the whole of 2024.

Around the first week of July I received my January P500 orders from GMT. This was their first experiment with Australia-friendly shipping, and it took a little longer than anyone expected. I wasn’t panicking, but I was relieved when a box arrived containing Fields of Fire, Deluxe Edition (GMT Games, 2025), Fighting Formations: US 29th Infantry Division (GMT Games, 2025 – you can check out my unboxing post here), In the Shadows (GMT Games, 2025 – unboxing post here), and the 2025 Replacement Counter-sheet.

Also arriving this quarter was the monumental Rock of Chickamauga (Flying Pig Games, 2025), the second volume n the Black Swan series. I had said I should have an unboxing post of the first volume, A Most Fearful Sacrifice, but that’s been let slide, like a couple of other games. Now Chickamauga has arrived, it’s an opportunity to do a compare and contrast, either as a single post or back to back posts.

Third Quarter haul. Missing are 1811 Albuera, and the
Replacement Counter Sheet from GMT.

I’m a relatively new convert to Gamefound. Around the beginning of the year, I backed three separate projects on the platform, and this quarter two of them found their way to my door. The first was a Shakos game, Rex Britannorum (Shakos, 2025 – get a peek here), to which I’d added a copy of their reprinted Breizh 1341 (see above). Next was 1811: Albuera, Second Edition (Tactical Workshop, 2025 – unboxing here). I’m hoping to see my other outstanding Gamefound preorder this coming quarter - Carl Paradis’s Battle Commander, Volume 1 (Sound of Drums ~2025), the first in a series of (as I understand it) six volumes covering he major theatres of the Napoleonic Wars. Volume 1 will cover Napoleon’s Italian campaigns. More on this, of course, when it arrives.

One of the reasons for the no-game Mondays mentioned above was T being overseas a lot. This included a trip to San Francisco for a medical conference.  Which meant an order from Noble Knight Games. I’d settled on just two games (like I said, I’m trying to rein in my acquisitions a little); I picked Napoleon’s Wheel (Operational Studies Group, 2020), and Radetzky’s March: The Road to Novara (Dissimula Editzioni, 2023), the second edition Sergio Schiavi’s first release through his company, Dissimula Editzioni. Nineteenth century conflicts are becoming more of a focus for me, both in reading and games, at least when I get a chance to play something that isn’t Commands and Colors: Medieval.

At the last minute I added WWII Commander, Volume 2: Market Garden (links above, in the Games played section). We’ve had a lot of fun with its sister game, WWII Commander, Volume 1: Battle of the Bulge (Compass Games, 2020), so it was an easy choice.

I also made a couple of opportunistic purchases of second-hand games that showed up on my radar. After long resistance to going down the GBoH rabbit-hole (too hard, too fussy, too expensive), I gave in and bought a very reasonably-priced, partially (less than a half a counter-sheet) punched copy of The Great Battles of Alexander: the Macedonian Art of War (GMT, 2015), which I may yet have resisted if it hadn’t been the 2023 printing which incorporated the Tyrant expansion (GMT Games, 2003), which brought up the number of scenarios to an impressive thirty-one. I haven’t factored this into my play schedule for the year, but having crossed this particular Rubicon, I may try to get it to the table in the coming year, which really isn’t all that far away.

My other second-hand purchases were also GMT games; an unpunched copy of the 1914: Glory’s End / When Eagles Fight Dual Pack (GMT Games, 2014), and a pre-loved Grand Illusion: Mirage of Glory, 1914 (GMT Games, 2004), both by Ted Raicer, the man who literally wrote the book on the subject - Crowns in the Gutter (Strategy & Tactics Press, 2010). I don’t have a lot of WWI games, and I didn’t have any that cover the Eastern Front, so another collection gap is now filled.

The Defiant One. Eustace, brother to Claude, is his sibling's opposite in nature.
He's a biter and is not satisfied until he draws blood, and he doesn't like me
very much, but to his credit he is generally respectful of set-up games.

I've played Breizh 1341 twice now, and tinkered with Rex Britannorum and Into the Shadows. I'm hoping to spend some time between now and Christmas getting to know the Fighting Formations system better, and I'm currently reading the series rules for the Library of Napoleonic Battles series; this is another one I'd like to noodle around with by myself before I try to introduce anyone else to it. 

 

Blog activity

A Fast Game saw a mere fifteen posts this quarter, an average of five a month. That's more than some quarters past, but I think I can do better.My posting cycle has been patchy at best, with long breaks in transmission, followed by feverish attempts to catch up. In July I only put up three posts. This was supposed to be four, but I mis-timed the posting of my last Quarterly Report by a couple of hours and slipped into the June count. I made a little better effort with six posts in August, and another six in September. Of these, six were unboxing posts (under the auspices of Stripped Down for Parts; unboxings are something I’ve talked about here and elsewhere before, but I want to come back to in a bit), five After Action Reports (these are mostly what appear under the heading, State of Play), and my first Feature piece and a follow-up Executive Summary of the report’s findings, one Public Service Announcement, and a belated, bedevilled review.

L'Estocq prevails at Elbing. Napoléon 1807.

To wit, I finally posted a review of Napoléon 1807 (Shakos, 2020 – you can find that here). Despite my best intentions, I’ve slipped on reviews this year. Part of my shortfall is due to the games I’ve been playing of late. When I do get a game in it is more often than not something I’ve already reviewed (I present Exhibit A – C&C Medieval). As I’ve stated numerous times, I’m not comfortable playing a game’s shortest scenario just once, then proclaiming a deep enough understanding of it to advise others on its qualities, which is essentially what a review does. My stated low limit is three games played before I start preparing a review, then I’ll try to get another play or two in before completing it. I played Napoleon 1807 eight or nine times over about six months (time away from a game to think about it and its possibilities is also crucial, in my opinion). Revisiting a game will offer more insight into what is happening, how the whole set of systems and sub-systems work to create a narrative of conflict, with all its vagaries, missteps, and accidents happy and unhappy. Nobody can rightly claim to understand a game after a single play. At best they may be able to discuss the superficial or surface interactions of the game’s systems. I’m rarely playing a new game as it was intended to be played before the second game; embarrassingly, sometimes it takes a third run to get that far. I’ve read or seen too many reviews or (more honestly) first impressions where the reviewer seems to be talking about a different game to the one in front of them, I get there’s pressure to put out new content, but every game, even the less than great ones, deserve some time spent and consideration given. A Fast Game is probably not the place to come if you want reviews of the latest games, but hopefully the reviews I post will be worth the reader’s time. Here the rant endeth.

I’ve recently realised something about myself and the way I engage with wargames. When I’m playing a game, if I’m enjoying it, I rarely experience any difficulty immersing myself in the unfolding narrative, feeling every small win or setback, every bit of the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat, even if I play it down in front of an opponent. Yet when I come to think back on the game I’ve just played, usually a couple of days later if I’m writing an AAR, I find myself capable only of engaging with the remembered game analytically, in terms of mechanics and the quirks of fortune. I’m not sure there’s anything I can do about that, but some readers seem to like the play-reports I’ve been posting, so I will probably stick to what we have going on for now, but I’m a little in awe of those that can spin a story out of the raw facts of the mechanical results of a game in their retelling.

The numbers say I'm doing something right. Over the last three months, A Fast Game has had a little shy of 9,600 visits, a little over three thousand a month (though in reality, July was a stellar month for visits, my second highest after June 2025, then I slumped to barely seventeen hundred in August). Most visitors just come in through the front page and read whatever is most recently posted, but seven posts - a mix of reviews, AARs and a couple of unboxings - are hitting near or over four hundred direct visits, and two of those - both reviews - are well over the five-hundred-visit mark. And no, that doesn't, mean it's time to start advertising (this is more out of laziness then any kind of high-mindedness, I'm sure).

 

Extra-curricular activities

Regular visitors to this blog will probably be aware that I’m a fan of the Charles S. Roberts Awards. Actually, I’m a fan of wargame awards in general – they highlight and celebrate good design and production, and prompt discussion among gamers. They have the potential to raise awareness of wargames outside the confines of our sometimes clique-y groups and fora, and they can shine a light on obscured gems that deserve more attention.

In recent years there’s been a school of thought within our broad church questioning the need or validity of wargame awards. I spend way too much time thinking about stuff like this, and I began to wonder how wargame publishers felt about the awards they vie for or get overlooked by. So, I sent a short questionnaire out to a bunch of companies and a subset of those wrote back. You can read about the whole ordeal and the results here (and if 5,000+ words is too much to face, you can get an executive summary here but it’s worth scanning through for the quotes). I am still astounded by the number of companies that wrote back to me (I’m not that big a deal). Pulling the data together, interrogating it and parsing some findings out of it took longer than I expected and impacted on my blog post output, but overall is was a lot of fun and I got to correspond with some interesting people, and I'm pretty happy with how it came out.

I haven’t been doing any more playtesting since With the Hammer (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2025), and I’m okay with that. I’m a much better proofer/editor; I don’t possess the “let’s break this thing” gene necessary for useful playtesting. I would like to do some further scenario development for Afrika Army Korps (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2025). I’m proud of what I helped put together for the game release and I wanted to do more but ran out of time. Again, this relies on time and energy, both of which are finite resources, but I’ll post them on BGG as they’re done, and, of course, mention them here.

 

What’s next

At this stage I don’t have any big plans for A Fast Game between now and the end of the year. I’d like to finish my declared Ten Wargame Challenge, even though the exercise feels a little pointless now, after the implosion of The War Room (I was never really in it for the prizes; A Fast Game originally started out of a misunderstanding about the Ten Wargame Challenge, which I’ve talked about before, but this was the first time I participated in the real thing). I may try to come up with something for next year, or try again if somebody decides to declare a wargame challenge like the War Room folks had done. 

I have a couple of ideas for pieces I’d like to write. I’m sketching out another two or maybe three posts of different aspects of block wargames (the Not Created Equal posts); you would have seen another one by now had I not got tunnel vision with the Value Proposition survey piece. I’m also thinking about a series of really narrow-focus interview pieces with people with more expertise than me. Like the Survey report, these will probably just follow my own obsessions, but they may be of interest to others. Time will tell. I also want to write more reviews, but this means I need to play new games - or revisit old favourites - more than once or twice.

I’m also going to try to get myself some more table time. When I have the opportunity to play a game, even a short one, I’ve been doing something else instead, and that hasn’t always been something that needs to be done right then. T and I have missed a lot of weeks for our Monday night games, and rather pull out a solitaire game instead, I’ve been either writing, reading, or (less productively) catching up on YouTube videos. Hell, even my wife has been telling me to play a short game for myself when I have a free night. I suspect, for all my good intentions, I still won’t get as many games out as I’ perhaps should, but I’m going to try to be more mindful of the option.

Thanks for reading this far. If you think I'm doing something right or wrong, please leave a comment. And if there's something you'd like to see on A Fast Game, or something you think would be worth the time to research, get in touch (comment or email).