By the Numbers: Revised collection breakdown (2025)

  

 

That Dyer fella has been hitting the sales again...

In my last By the Numbers post I looked at my Collection to Game Played ratio, the number of games I’ve played against the number I’ve played overall. I’m happy to report that, in spite of my increasing collection size, I’ve managed to keep roughly the same percentage played of the larger collection, so I am playing new games.

That said, I have a slowly growing number of games not as yet punched (and, where appropriate, clipped). Some of these are magazine games that I just haven’t got to yet, some are more daunting a prospect, like the behemoth Pacific War, Second Edition (GMT Games, 2022). In that particular case, I know it’s going to be a big task and I hate leaving a game half-punched (punching and sorting is the riskiest time for misplacing counters in my experience), and I’ve been putting it off until I have a week of evenings free to spend on it. I’m also leaning toward springing for a set of Cube 4 Me trays to accommodate the ten sheets (?!) of counters. Needless to say, all of the unpunched games fall into the “yet to be played” category.

Having sorted the core games from the expansions once more, I thought I’d take the opportunity to run some simple analytics and share the results. I could get deeper into the tall grass here, but I wanted to keep it fairly simple. If anyone would like to know more about what I’ve put together here, or if there’s something you’re desperately wondering about that I haven’t covered here, leave a comment at the end of the post and I’ll see what I can come up with.

Collection by publisher

I’ll lead off with games by publisher. While there are a number of new companies represented here, but mostly I’m a creature of habit. I tend to gravitate toward designers and publishers with which I already have some familiarity. I’ve written about how I approach collection development and acquisition previously, and I try to be open to new things, but I’m much more circumspect about what I

When I went through this last time, the collection represented twenty-seven publishers. This time the count comes in at thirty-nine. I ‘m trying to choose my games more pragmatically these days – As I’ve mentioned before, we live in an apartment and there’s only so much space and it’s getting close to peak-game.

The lion’s share of the collection is still made up of GMT Games, but their share has dropped from around 44% in the previous audit to 36.4%. This is still well ahead of the next-highest represented companies, Worthington Publishing and Compass Games at 12.4% (29 titles) and 10.3% (22) respectively (these three are the only publishers to hit double-digit percentages). Legion comes in next at eleven titles, with Flying Pig Games and Conflict Simulations Ltd tied for fifth place with eight titles each.

Twenty of the publishers are represented in the collection by a single title. This is unlikely to change in some cases; Mark Simonitch’s imprint Terran Games, I believe only produced a couple of editions of The Legend Begins: North Africa, 1940-42 (Terran Games, 1990), before embarking on his long association with GMT. Others will eventually come off that list – Clint Warren-Davey’s Gallipoli: Ordered to Die (The Dietz Foundation, ~2026), for example, should be arriving sometime in the first half of next year.

Fun fact: 14.5% of the collection – 34 games in all – are from European publishers. Honestly, I thought this would be a little higher, closer to 20%. Brian Train’s Somalia Interventions (Schutze Games, 2019) is the only game in the collection from an Australian publisher, although these are produced in the US by Blue Panther. Then again, nearly all the other games in the collection were printed and assembled in China, so no shame there.

 

Collection by Mode

Here I’ve broken the collection down into four Modes as per the Charles S. Roberts Awards format, the categories being Tactical, Operational, and Strategic, with the addition of an Abstract category to capture the odd titles like Günter Cornett’s Agamemnon (Osprey Games, 2016). This is the same way I broke the collection down the last time.

Long-time readers will know that I maintain my favourite mode of play is Operational. I enjoy the grand complication of manoeuvre and supply, further complicated by a challenging opponent. On the face of it, the numbers bely this assertion; the biggest share of the collection belong under the heading of Tactical (52.1%). I’ve come to a simple explanation for this – most of my gaming opportunities are relatively brief – three or four hours, tops, but mostly closer to two hours maximum – and I don’t have anywhere to leave a game set up. Tactical games tend to lend themselves well to shorter playing times, especially small unit exchanges as depicted in systems like Band of Brothers, Combat Commander, Conflict of Heroes or Panzer. Some larger-scale systems – <cough> Commands & Colors <cough> – also lend themselves well to a couple-hours’ play (and do away with the need to teach new rules-sets to the uninitiated each week). 

Shakos' Conquerors series is an exception to the rule, an operational level game that
 is often playable in just a few hours (pictured: Napoléon 1806 (Shakos, 2017).

Collection by Player-Count

For this tally I went with the intended player count for each game. Since 2020, a lot of companies have been making laudable efforts to offer solitaire rules for more of their games, which is great – I know how hard it can be to find a live opponent sometimes – but these are usually still designed primarily as games for two or more players. This is also a good thing; I enjoy solitaire games (and own a reasonable number, with others on my wish-list), but I prefer to pay face to face, or failing that, via a platform like Rally the Troops.

In light of these considerations, I’ve parsed the collection in terms of each game’s intended number of players. This doesn’t teel the whole story; Chancellorsville,1863 (Worthington Publishing, 2020) is intentionally a two-player game that I’ve only ever played solitaire. While there are a few other outliers, but for the most part, I’ve bought games with the full intention of playing them as their creator intended.

The majority of the collection were designed initially as two-player games, and overall percentage has nudged up a bit since the last time we looked at it. In my earlier analysis I’d included a fourth division, collecting games that had dedicated solo rules in spite of notionally a two- or multi-player game. The overall two-player count in my last analysis – including the two-player component of games with their own solitaire modes – came to a whopping 78% if the collection. In this count, the total comes to 81.6% (191 games). This stands to reason, as most traditional wargames involve two opponents slugging it out, often one side as the aggressor and the other playing defence.

I’ve been leaning into two-player games more, and on reflection, nearly all my “opportunistic” purchases – games that have come up for sale second-hand at a price I’m willing and able to pay – have been two-player tactical or operational games (in the last twelve months, I think the only outlier here was Charioteer (GMT Games, 2022) – I haven’t given up entirely on multi-player games, but I am more circumspect about how likely I will be to get them to the table. Also, the multi-player games that I do own tend to lean more toward the gamey end of the continuum, like Tank Duel (GMT Games, 2019) and Ancient Civilizations of the Inner Sea (GMT Games, 2019)

Another plus of two player games is that many (by no means all) can be played double-handed right out of the box. Also, thanks in a large part to COVID-related lockdowns, many games these days are showing up with dedicated solitaire rules or modes of play.

I was a little surprised to see how few dedicated solitaire games I own, but according to the raw numbers, the quotient of solitaire games in the collection hasn’t budged since the last audit; I still own just twenty solitaire games, one more than the previous count (now just 8.1% of the collection). So, in the last year-and-a-half, I, Napoleon (GMT Games, 2024) – bought on a whim during the last great GMT Summer Sale and regrettably taking up real estate on my TBP shelf since – would have been my sole addition to the solitaire quotient.

 

Some thoughts

Through the course of the last year or so, I’ve grown much more pragmatic about what’s achievable in the wargaming space for me. While there are some games I’m loath to part with, I’ve come around to parting with some games that are never likely to see my table as least. I on-sold two multiplayer games that took up a lot of shelf-inches between them (Pendragon: The Fall of Roman Britain (GMT Games, 2017) and Border Reivers: Anglo-Scottish Border Raids, 1513-1603 (GMT Games, 2023)), but these went to someone I regularly game with, so they’re still in the ecosystem (in fact, we did get to play Border Reivers earlier this year). I’m still hanging on to some multi-player games, like Versailles, 1919 (GMT Games, 2020) and Time of Crisis (GMT Games, 2017), but I can’t keep things around because I might get to play them some day. Actually, put like that, a full half of my collection could fall into that category. That notwithstanding, I have begun the process of shedding some of the games that I’m reasonably certain will never grace my table. I’d rather devote that space to something I will likely play; as stated previously, I’m getting up to peak game. Just this week I managed to sell off about eight inches of RPG materials, only to blow that PayPal credit on about seven inches of new games (these will be revealed as they arrive, but four games from two publishers – two two-player and two solitaire, much more in my wheelhouse).

On a positive note, I think I can honestly say that I haven’t been disappointed with a single game I’ve acquired since the last audit, at least the ones I’ve spent any time with, and I can’t see a reason to doubt I won’t enjoy the ones I’ve yet to dig into. I’m also leaning into system games, those that use a core rules-set to cover a multitude of situations. Of course, I’ve been doing this for years with systems like Commands & Colors and Battles of the American Revolution, but after several positive experiences with the Standard Combat Series and Men of Iron rules, I’m graduating to the grown-ups table with GBACW and my very first GBoH game, The Great Battles of Alexander (GMT Games, 2015). This ties in as much with my frugal tendencies and my wish/need to reduce the burden of learning a new game every time out of the gate.

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There's a lot more I could say about the collection, about recent acquisitions, and the state of gaming in general, but I need to keep something back for the Quarterly Report next month. While I was writing this up, I managed to sell some RPG books I won't be using. Payment came via PayPal, and so rather than sensibly banking the proceeds, I went Black Friday shopping with a couple of publishers that weren't doing Black Friday sales. Nonetheless, I was able to procure four games, and to cross four titles off my WANT list. So, by the end of January, the collection should be creeping up to 238 titles. At this stage I estimate Peak Game, the total number of titles I can fit in our apartment before Jess files divorce proceedings, is around the 300 mark, and that relies on getting rid of about another twelve feet of old RPG Materials. 

Wish me luck.