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| 9th Division Army Service Corps, Tobruk, September 1941 (Courtesy of the Australia War Memorial). |
Three months into the new year, I find myself feeling
like a bit of a fraud. A Fast Game began a blog about playing wargames, but
there hasn’t been a lot of games played lately. Life, family illness, and associated
stresses intrude on plans, or weariness overtakes the planner. Either way, I’m
left with feelings of guilt over missed opportunities. This leaves me in a
funk, a little black terrier growling and pulling at my trouser leg.
Writing is the best salve for this funk, but I’ve
been wilfully ignoring this avenue out of Achillean stubbornness (I’ll come
back to this later in the post). I think I’m digging my way out of that funk
now. The terrier is in the corner, chastened but alert.
Overall, I’m a little disappointed with my written output
these last three months – the quantity thereof, of the quality I’m quite
chuffed – and dissatisfied with my own participation in the hobby. Through the
course of preparing this report, my view of the last three months of A Fast Game
has softened a little; I do feel like I’ve achieved some joy in some areas, in
spite of not meeting my own expectations in others. On balance, it hasn’t been
a bad quarter.
Incoming
In previous quarterly reports, this section has been
called Games Purchased, but most of the arriving games in a given quarter have
been ordered and paid for in advance, sometimes a year or more earlier. So, I’m
changing it to “Incoming” partly in keeping with a martial theme, partly
because some quarters it can feel somewhat like a barrage.
Overall, I’ve received twelve wargames and two expansions/supplements
in the last three months. Q1 2026 was the Quarter of Big Boxes. No less than
three games arrived in 12” by 12” shells (see the photo attached). A GMT P500
order arrived with two Mark Simonitch games (and a mounted board for Italy ’43 (GMT Games, 2025)) and Unconditional Surrender! Western Campaigns (GMT Games, 2025). I also received Battle Commander, Volume 1 (Sound of Drums, 2026) and its first expansion, and
Gallipoli: Ordered to Die (The Dietz Foundation, 2025), both crowdfunded through the usual channels.
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| Q1 haul. Not pictured; Bansai 28, Paper Wars #84 (Autumn 2016). 1846: The Race for the Midwest is an honourable mention. I've never played an 18XX game, and the price was very good, so I grabbed this and 1777: Year of the Hangman (Clash of Arms, 2002) as a job lot. |
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that Brian Train’s latest COIN game, China’s War (GMT Games, 2025) was subbed-out for another title I won in a raffle draw. I was particularly heartened to receive a contributor’s copy of BonSai Games’ Bansai 28. I’ve bleated about this enough – you can read about it here – but, but by happy coincidence, it included a a revised edition of the game Balkan Gamble, also designed by Mr Train. He was kind enough to forward me the English language rules and scenario details (the game covers four planned but unexecuted invasions of Greece/Yugoslavia between 1943 and 1950). This is near the top of my to be played. And as if the gods themselves smiled down on the exchange, a copy of Mr Train’s Finnish Civil War (Compass Games, 2016) in issue 84 of Paper Wars arrived (with Battle Commander, but that’s a story for another time) on the same day as Bansai 28. China’s War arrived the following week.
The others were opportunistic purchases, on my part – get ’em before they’re gone. I've already posted an unboxing of War & Peace, Seventh Edition (Avalon Digital, 2025); the others will be forthcoming.
Games played
This will be short. And embarrassing. In the last three
months I think I’ve played maybe nine games or less to completion, depending on
how you define complete. When I’m playing a game two-handed, I’ll sometimes
stop when a probable conclusion is clear, when it would be impossible for one
side to make it out of the hole they’ve dug, and those last three or so rounds
would just be a slow attrition, delaying the inevitable.
I’ve also played out the first couple of rounds of a
handful of games, only to pack them up again before I’ve reached the meat of
the game. These last three months have been a season of disruptions. This happened
twice with The Battle of Blenheim, 1704 (Legion Wargames, 2018), and twice
again in the last several weeks, with Battle
Commander, Vol 1.
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| French Regulars and Guard advance on brittle Spanish militia (Valour and Fortitude). |
T and I haven’t met for a game since a couple of weeks before Christmas. We thought we may be able to squeeze one in tonight (the last day of March), but circumstances would not permit. The reason for our extended break is also the cause of much of the stress across the extended family these past months, and a big contributor to my not clocking more games recently.
Something I have played quite a bit these last three
months is minis games. I participated in a couple of miniatures games using the
Valour and Fortitude rules (Perry Miniatures, 2022), which is fast becoming the
go-to rules for a sweep of periods. This quarter we’ve played an American
Revolutionary War action and an early Peninsular War game.
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| Not quite a free-for-all (Jugula). |
We also had two consecutive weeks of Gladiator games, Spartacus: a Game of Blood and Treachery (Gale Force Nine, 2012), which was mechanically elegant and a brilliant engine builder but didn’t blow my socks off, and Jugula (Studio Tomahawk, 2014), which did. Spartacus is more about building your ludus and stabbing your competition in the back, and the side-spectacle of the gladiatorial combat almost a distraction. Jugula is all arena combat, with a brilliant card-based system where the deck both offers advantages and determines your fate at each exchange of blows. If swords and sandals are your thing, hunt down a copy of the Jugula rules and decks (you’ll need one deck for each team, but there are lots of options for your team).
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| We who are about to die... (Jugula). |
Blog matters;
or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the box
This Quarter I’ve posted just nineteen entries to A
Fast Game (including this one). In my last Quarterly Report, I mentioned I was
hoping to improve the posting count from 2025, but that Quarter I put up twenty-two
posts all up. There are a lot of little contributing factors at play here, but
I want to look at one here in particular.
Like I said at the start, I started A Fast Game to talk about playing games. In spite of barely getting any table-time in the last three months, I still think of myself as a wargame player rather than a wargame collector. So, it wasn’t much of a shock when I realised unboxing posts made up a third of the entries posted in the last three months (compared to just two AARs), and three of those went up consecutively. This isn’t really a problem– I treat unboxings like a community service and try to make them informative and entertaining – but lately I’ve been hyper-conscious of A Fast Game starting to look like a big advertisement. Or the online equivalent of a used car lot.
I have about four unboxing posts in various states of completion and could probably have upped the quota for Q1 so something like last year’s levels, but I realise now I’ve been self-editing my posting. I’ve got four games that arrived between January and now that I’d like to write up, as well as another eight or ten from last year. If I had pushed through and finished some of these, I probably would have felt better overall about the blog, and would probably have written more overall, not just the unboxings. I hope I’ve turned a corner with actually playing games, but I’ll also try not to let my embarrassment form not posting AARs get in the way of posting unboxings.Another thing regulars may have noticed is I’ve
added a new, if infrequent, feature to A Fast Game. Q1 saw two short-form
interviews, with designer/publisher Yasushi Nakaguro and social media impresario Grant Linneberg. This is something I’be been thinking about for a while. I want to
present short interviews with a relatively concentrated focus on a given
subject. I’m still finding my feet a little with it, but the reception so far
has been encouraging. I’m currently lining up another interview and have a few
other subjects in mind. It will stay an infrequent addition to the stable, but
expect to see more of these.
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| Early action in the Battle of Montebello (Battle Commander). |
The view count is a pretty high-level metric and
doesn’t mean much; in a previous job I was responsible for reporting on a handful
of metrics, and the Marketing division was in love with the overall site visit metric
because it just kept going up, in spite of the fact that the actual number of
visits per month was circling the drain.
I don’t know how many of those visits result in the
reader glancing over what’s on offer and digging further or just bouncing off and
checking out YouTube videos instead. A Fast Game isn’t monetised, and I don’t
want to pay for Google Analytics, so I can only extrapolate from the meagre data
provided in basic Blogger.
The simple analytics you get with Blogger show you the
Top Referrers and Top Referring URLs – who is sending readers your way, and how
they are getting there. These usually pick up less than ten percent of the
overall visits for a given duration (I have it set up for the last week’s
activities). So, while I get readers from recommendations on other websites,
the majority seem to come through the front door; that is, the come to the general
blog address and see whatever I’ve posted most recently, then sometimes they’ll
go rummaging through the back-catalogue.
Traffic report.
As I’ve said previously, I’m really appreciative of
the mentions I get on other blogs and elsewhere (you know who you are), but the
bread and butter of the blog is people who presumably have A Fast Game bookmarked
and drop in every other week or so to see what’s going on. In this case, the
referrals are gravy, and I return the favour when I can. Referrals must be how
most people find A Fast Game in the first place. A Google search for <”a
fast game is a good game” blog> brought up half-a-dozen links each to old Armchair Dragoons’ Tuesday Newsday posts
and GMT Games’ product pages, but no direct link to the blog (I’m sure this would
change if I turned on Adsense).
I mostly write A Fast Game for myself. I go down statistical
rabbit holes and chase down obscure facets of art history because that’s what
interests me. But the knowledge that people are coming back to read what’s on
offer, and occasionally even comment on it, brings its own reward. Thanks for
coming along.
An international audience.
Extracurricular
activities
Nothing to report on this front. If I haven’t had
the time or opportunity to play wargames, I certainly haven’t had the capacity
to play-test anything. That may change in the future, but I can’t promise
anything.
Next steps
Last year I wrote the first part of what I envisioned
would be a three-part exploration of Block Wargames, why and how they do what
they do. It started as a two-parter, but after rethinking it, I edited down the
second part and posted it under the title Not
Created Equal: a Block Wargame Primer, Part 1 – Commands & Colors; an odd place to start, but there you go. I’ve been meaning to get back
to it for a while, but I’ve finally started to sketch out a couple more
chapters (to make it a four-part series in all, maybe five if I can maintain
the momentum), and I hope to get at least another one up on the blog before the
end of June. I may even rework the first chapter to bring it more in line with
the others (no promises there, I hate reworking old material).
I’d like to do another research article as well; I
have an idea of what I’d like to look at, but I’m struggling with the
methodology. If I can crack that nut, you may see another long-form piece later
this year.
In the meantime, expect to see more unboxings, hopefully
some AARs, maybe another interview or two. I especially can’t make promises
when other people are involved – I’m at the whim of their schedules and
commitments. The interviews are fun to do, and after I fire off the first batch
of questions, I can get on with something else until I get a reply.
So as always, expect more of the same. Thank you for
reading this far, and for coming back to A Fast Game if you’re a regular. If
you can keep showing up, I should be able to keep it interesting. And I’ll try
to be less morose this quarter.
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