2025 Q4 Report: Full of Things

 

 

Sending season's greetings.

“And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke

 

For a more complete picture of how the year panned out, I'll refer you to my previous reports for Q1, Q2, and Q3.

 

About this time last year, I wrote a By the Numbers post called What I did in 2024. I made a kind of checklist of general subjects that I could quantify, like the number of games I’d bought or played over the course of the year, and the kinds of things I’d posted to A Fast Game, and I also discussed some more qualitative stuff. Over the course of 2025, I’ve fallen into using this model for a more structured quarterly report, so no more “What I Did” pieces from hereon in, just the quarterlies. I will probably talk a little more broadly about some aspects of the year, but I’m not going to duplicate great swaths of previous reports. Here you’ll get the whole numbers for the year as well as the last quarter, but if you want to see how my collection grew over 2025, I’d point you to the links to the previous three quarterly reports for the year at the top of this post. You’re welcome.

2025 was a strange year in a couple of respects. I’m not going to get into a discussion about tariffs or shipping price-hikes, but there was all of that. 2025 was a year I spent much more time thinking about wargames than playing them. Part of this was circumstantial, part of it was accidental, but another part feels like it was avoidable, after the fact.

 

Games purchased

In last year’s What I did post I wrote that I gained 34 games in the course of the year. In my Collection-to-Games Played Ratio I said I’d purchased – or more accurately, received – forty-one games (actually forty-two, but I’ll come back to that). There are a couple of reasons for this discrepancy, but they all boil down to me being an idiot. The list I was working off for the Games to games played piece was an extract from my Owned list on Boardgamegeek.com; yes, I list my collection on BGG, and it’s public facing, if you’re at all curious. It also includes the family games we play, so the count blows out to over 300 titles. I’m usually fairly diligent about adding newly acquired titles to my BGG record, and I’ve come to rely on it as a single source of truth. Except the system isn’t foolproof and sometimes things slip through the cracks. While I was preparing the current list, I realised there were about three titles I’d neglected to add, including A Most Fearful Sacrifice: The Three Days of Gettysburg (Flying Pig Games, 2022), which I was certain had been on the list, but was not.

Fourth quarter haul. The Combat Commander Minor Nations folio with the extra
material included in the new combined Europe/Mediterranean box is missing
from the photo.

In the fourth quarter, the collection grew by six games (plus one extra, which I’ll get to) and an expansion (Combat Commander: Minor Nations. Three of those were Legion Wargames games I’d been keen to acquire for a while (I’m working through an unboxing sequence, starting with The Battle of Blenheim, 1704 (Legion Wargames, 2018), which you can read here), second hand copies of Charioteer (GMT Games, 2023) and Beware the Ides of March (Hollandspiele, 2024).

I’ve always maintained that I will not solicit review copies of games from publishers, but I attended the last Compass Games Town Hall for the year – Bill Thomas and this team do a live fortnightly show on YouTube, and give away a copy of their latest release via a lottery system. Except for the end of year show, Bill was feeling especially generous, and gave away about a dozen games and copies of Paper Wars that had been released in 2025, and I was lucky enough to have my name drawn for a copy of Mike Vitale’s Desert Blitzkrieg: Rommel's North African Campaign (Compass Games, 2025), which arrived today, in time for the 2025 count. Rest assured, an unboxing post and AAR will be coming in the new year.

This, apparently, is what winning looks like.

This was one of two wargames I won in tottery draws this year. Grant from Pushing Cardboard had a giveaway on his website, and I was drawn for a copy of Italy '43 (GMT Games, 2025). I already have a copy on its way (hopefully due in a fortnight or so), so I'm tossing up what to do with this copy. I may run some sort of competition on A Fast Game, but I'm not sure how that would work yet. Stay tuned.

Over the course of the year, I’ve received thirty-seven games* (and two supplementary materials, GMT’s 2024 Replacement Counter-sheet, and Combat Commander: Battle Pack #8 – Minor Nations (GMT Games, 2025). This is up three titles from last year (after me saying 2025 was the year I would wind back my game purchasing), and I’m expecting a GMT delivery (three games) and another game each from Sound of Drums and Les3 Zouaves early-ish in the new year.

We live in an apartment, and not a particularly large one. I’ve estimated previously that I can probably accommodate around 300 wargames before I need to start weeding the collection. Here, at the end of 2025, I’m sitting at 248; not “peak wargame” – well, not quite – but my buying habits will have to to adjust accordingly.

Addressing that in a small way, 2025 was they year I went hard on computer games, or more accurately, computer ports of existing board wargames. I bought Rebel Fury, Waterloo and Gettysburg (for a bundle discount), Saratoga (a port of the Battles of the American Revolution game from GMT), all from Hexes of War, and SpaceCorp (Logix Interatvive,2025), Britannia and Napoleon’s Eagles from Avalon Digital, and Bill Kalapoglou’s Arete (Molotov Cockatiel Games, 2025), all available via Steam.

 

Games played

I’ve posted a separate account of games played here. It turns out I had played more games through the course of the year than I had expected, but less than I would have liked. These weren’t all wargames, but engaging in any game is a chance to learn something new.  There were more role-playing sessions with the Wednesday group than last year, but RPGs are what brought that group together in the first place, so I can’t really begrudge that. I’ve been a part of the Wednesday group for seventeen years next March. In that time, we’ve played a number of wargames (mostly miniatures, but others ranging from The Grizzled (Sweet Games, 2015) to Here I Stand (GMT Games, 2015)), but it’s not a wargaming group, and I can’t count on getting my fix here. This year we played sixteen games (we played Border Reivers: Anglo-Scottish Border Raids, 1513-1603 (GMT Games, 2023) and Successors (Phalanx, 20, each over two weeks). Our host is an inveterate lead-pusher as well, and will often have a game already set up from another weekly game night, so I got to try three different, new-to-me miniatures rulesets; Lion Rampant, Second Ed. (Osprey Games, 2022) for Saxons and Late Romans, Pikeman’s Lament (Osprey Games, 2017) for the English Civil War, and Valour & Fortitude (Perry Miniatures, 2022) for some Peninsula action.

Long-time readers may remember I started this blog as part of a project rather misguidedly inspired by the War Room’s annual Ten Game Challenge. So, I thought it would be fitting to actually take part in the official proceedings.

I signed up for the War Room’s Ten Wargame Challenge for 2025; not only have I fallen short of playing ten of the nominated twelve games (two back-ups were allowed), but the War Room as a collaborative YouTube entity has ceased be. I’m not so narcissistic as to think I singularly brought on the institution’s end, but I possess enough inherent paranoia to wonder, “Did I jinx it?” When the War Room fell over, there was a lot of discussion on Facebook and elsewhere about whether people should still try to finish their challenge lists (a dozen or more had already ploughed through there ten, and at least one FB friend had actually played all twelve games on his list. I wanted to finish my list; it was furnished with games I’d wanted to table for a year or more in some cases. But internal and external pressures prevented me from getting past the five I managed to get played (I played a Rebel Fury (GMT Games, 2024) scenario Spotsylvania on Steam, but never got around to writing it up).

For fifteen years now, I’ve been spending a Monday evening – sometimes Tuesday (and since his schedule has cleared, occasionally Thursday) – playing wargames nearly exclusively, face to face with my brother-in-law, who I refer to here as T. In the past we played Commands & Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010) exclusively; after about the first nine years we branched out into other C&C flavours, and in recent years, I’ve got him to play other games as well, sometimes. In the earlier years we’d consistently play between forty and forty-five weeks out of the year (and usually get a Wings of War (Nexus, 2004) or a Trafalgar (Warhammer Historical, 2009) game in on Boxing Day. This year we only managed twenty-six games all up. The other twenty-six were lost to a combination of sickness, travel, and family commitments (T is now a doting grandfather). I don’t resent the lost opportunities, but it was another reason for my game count falling off this year.

Another reason was, I simply didn’t take all the opportunities I had to play a game when they presented themselves. Which segues us into the next section.

 

Games unplayed

This is a new subheading that will probably only appear in Q4 reports. Or maybe not; let’s see how it goes. Since the beginning of A Fast Game, I’ve always begun the year with grandiose plans of what I hope to accomplish, then it gets to the end of the year and what do I have to show for it? Admission is the first step to healing, so here is where I’ll fess up to all those things I declared I wanted to do but didn’t get done. Kind of a psychoanalytic version of a shelf of shame selfie.

The American Civil War remains under-fought in my household. I had planned to get By Swords and Bayonets (GMT Games, 2025) and A Most Fearful Sacrifice to the table as part of my Ten Wargame Challenge, and Flanks of Gettysburg (Compass Games, 2024) in 2025. This didn’t happen. I even told designer Herman Luttmann that I was finally going to play AMFS this year, and I didn’t follow through. This was why I had both AMFS and By Swords and Bayonets on my Ten Game Challenge list.

Our last Monday night game was Yorktown from the Commands and Colors Tricorne:
the American Revolution (Compass Games, 2017) The French and More! Expansion
(Compass Games, 2018). I'm embarrassed to say this was the first scenario
we've played from the expansion.

Crucially, 2025 was meant to be the year I learned the Great Battles of the American Civil War (GBACW) system, something I said I was going to do in 2024 as well. This didn’t happen, either. With BS&B, I now own four GBACW titles – the three most recent box games (BS&B, Into the Woods: The Battle of Shiloh, April 6-7, 1862 (GMT Games, 2022), and Death Valley: Battles for the Shenandoah (GMT Games, 2019), plus Wilson's Creek: The West's First Fight, August 10, 1861 (SPI, 1980) from Strategy & Tactics, issue 80), but all remain unpunched, glowering and taunting from their shelf.

This year, after resisting the siren call for some time, I finally gave in and bought my first Great Battles of History (GBoH) game; the one that started it all, The Great Battles of Alexander: Macedonian Art of War (GMT Games, 2015). A second-hand copy of the most recent printing (including the Tyrant expansion) came up for sale, mostly unpunched, and bearing a faint mothball odour. This was apparently enough to put one off, and when it was still available after about four months, I thought it was meant to be. This now sits on the shelf next to the GBACW games and is picking up their glowering habits. I’ve said for the last two years that this would be the year I’d crack GBACW.

Many of the games I didn’t get to on my Ten Wargame Challenge list because I was holding out to play them against an opponent instead of two-handing them, including We Are Coming, Nineveh (Nuts! Publishing, 2023 – this game actually come solitaire rules, so doubly no excuse), Waterloo, 1815: Fallen Eagles II (Hexasim, 2022), and Imperial Bayonets: We Were Not Cowards –Sedan 1870 (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2020), when I really should have bitten the bullet and played them solo. This is what I did with Drop Zone: Southern France (Worthington Publishing, 225) when T cancelled our game that week at the last minute. In fact, I haven’t played that many solo games this year at all. In 2025 I played six separate times spread over four games.

This year I struggled to get motivated to play. Quite a bit, in truth. Some times when I had the oppotunity to play even something short, just setting up a game often felt insurmountable. This was a symptom of something else going on, unrelated to gaming, but that nonetheless affected this and other parts of my life adversely (I’m sure this was a contributing factor to my posting output slowing over 2025 as well). I wouldn’t say I’m much better than I have been, but I think I’ve turned a corner in this regard, and I’m looking forward to a more play-full coming year.

 

Blog matters

I have written quite a bit though 2025, though not quite as much as the previous couple of years. At time of writing, I have posted around 358,500 words to A Fast Game since its start at the end of January, 2023; If it were a novel, it would be longer than The Brothers Karamazov, nearly as long as David Copperfield, but a lot less compelling than either. This is in the space of a little less than three years. Not counting this report, I have posted sixty-one posts since February 1st. I haven’t written or posted as much this year as I have in either of the two previous years, but you have to keep in mind that the technical year-end for the blog is the end of January, so I may catch up a little here (check in again around January 31 for the third anniversary post).

In mid-October A Fast Game hit 50,000 views, and half of those came from readers over the most recent ten or so months. As I write that number is a little shy of 62,000. I’ve had various posts mentioned on The Armchair Dragoons and grognard.com, and the good folks at GMT continue to add my unboxing and review efforts to their product pages, alongside the work of more celebrated critics.

When I started writing A Fast Game, I was still finding my feet with the blog, after a long absence from writing anything consequential. Frankly, some of the stuff I wrote in the first six months is a little embarrassing, but You have to start somewhere, and I think I have become a better writer in the intervening couple of years. I made a conscious effort to post useful material. When the Charles S. Roberts Award nominees were announced, A Fast Game was the first (and so far as I am aware, the only) place on the web to post a complete list of nominees along with links to their respective BGG pages. This year I also published my first feature article, a survey of the value of wargame awards for publishers, which took time and effort and the good graces of many publishers who responded to my cold-call questionnaire. This was fun to put together and I would definitely do a research project like this again if I find an interesting enough subject. Suggestions for future feature subjects are welcome.

I feel like the writing and the arguments behind it have matured somewhat from that first year. I’m a little surer of what I mean to say, and more willing to not write about something unless I feel I have something to contribute to the conversation. I still tend to apply an irreverent tone to most subjects, but that’s just me, and it comes from a place of love and respect. That won’t be changing.

 

Extra-curricular activities

I did some scenario development and layout work for Ray Weiss’s Afrika Army Korps (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2025), which was released earlier this year. Since then, I’ve backed off from pretty much everything wargame-related except playing, posting to A Fast Game, and engaging with the Pushing Cardboard Discord channel. Grant Linneberg has built a friendly, respectful, and welcoming community of serious gamers, and I feel lucky to have been accepted into it.

I tried out for proofing work with Decision Games (for their bi-monthly magazines, Strategy & Tactics and World at War), and with GMT Games, but didn’t get a guernsey in either case. I’m not all that upset about this; it would be nice to contribute to the hobby with more than half-baked opinions and the occasional rant, but doing this kind of work would seriously eat into my ranting time. So, for now, I’ll be sticking to A Fast Game as my sole avenue of contribution.

I posted a printable copy of the Scenario set for AAK on the game’s BBG page (it’s in letter – I submitted an A4 colour version as well, along with Printer-Friendly versions of both standard sizes, but only the colour Letter-sized version was accepted). I’ve yet to find a retailer in Adelaide that stocks Letter-sized paper, which is disappointing, considering A4 sheets don’t easily fit into American game boxes. If anyone can tell me where to get some (besides on Amazon with their extortionate prices), please let me know in the comments. I’m still thinking about some additional scenarios for AAK – it’s such a great sandbox game, it really deserves some more love. I’ll (try to) post each new scenario to BGG as they become available, and I’ll let the faithful know on this blog.

 

What’s next?

Last year said I wasn’t going to commit to anything gaming-wise, except maintaining work on A Fast Game, then I fell off the wagon and signed up for the War Room’s Ten Wargame Challenge. I’ve already talked here about how that worked out. I think I’ve finally learnt my lesson and so I’m not going to make any hard and fast declarations about wargaming intentions. Well, at least for this year -no challenges, not numerical goals. I’m going to make more of an effort to learn a handful of game-systems, and GBACW will be on this list. Given my limited storage capacity, system games are gaining in appeal. I’m hoping I like GBoH as well, as that’s a particularly rich vein to extract. If I settle on a short selection, I may write something about it in the new year, but it will be at best an intention, not a commitment.

Impending Allied assault on Sidi Barrani; Operation Compass scenario,
Afrika Army Korps (CSL, 2925).

Turning to extra-curricular activities, if I can get myself in the right frame of mind again, I'd like to write up two or three more short (four-eight turn) scenarios for Afrika Army Korps, including Operation Battleaxe (which was incomplete at time of publication) and a hypothetical of the planned, but never executed Operation Silk. I've been kicking around an idea for a solo print & play game covering a siege from the Thirty Years' War, but I wouldn't expect to see that in 2026. I wrote a solo journaling game about a secretive cabal a while ago on an interstate flight. It needs a rewrite, but I promised my wife I would finish it off and and send it out into the world this year. All of this is wish-list stuff, except for the journaling game (a promise is a promise), but I tend to get restless without a couple of things on the go.

As for the blog, I will keep doing what I’ve been doing with A Fast Game. This has become more important to me than I would have ever expected. It has garnered praise from people whose opinions I respect, and it helped a handful of people find new games and new experiences they otherwise may not have stumbled across. I would be open to trying new types of post, if anyone has any suggestions (I have done this before), but in the short term, I will be sticking to what I know works. Unboxings will often include art history lessons, and After-Action Reports will still highlight the mistakes that were made (we screw it up so you don’t have to). And I’ll try to knock out more than five game reviews over the next twelve months. No promises, though.

I began writing the quarterly reports for the same reason I began writing the blog in the first place; to hold myself to account regarding whatever goal or quest I’d set for myself. If I’m not setting targets, there seems to be less need for a status update every three months. But… I’ve come to look forward to writing these reports. They are way for me to keep in mind what I’m spending my hard-earned on, and where I’m putting my time. So, I think I’ll be sticking to these as well.

 So, that's the year that was, and a glimpse into what's to come. All that's left is to thank you, gentle reader, for persisting this far. I hope you've enjoyed the blog this year, and I hope you'll come back again in 2026. Happy New Year, and I'll leave you with a toast that a late friend was fond of giving:

We may not always get what we want, 

and we may not always get what we need; 

just so long as we don't get what we deserve.

 

*Make that thirty-eight games - I really wasn't expecting Desert Blitzkrieg to arrive before the New Year.

2025 Q2 Report: Uphill Both Ways

 

 

The Capture of Hamel Village (probably the earliest successful combined arms
operation, 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.

 

 

State of Play: a personal note (nothing to see here; or, file under “Excuses and Complaints”)

 

 

Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel holding a strategy meeting with his divisional comanders.

Regular readers will have noticed these last few months, since around June, a tapering off of content. Where I was regularly posting two to three times a week, lately I’ve barely struggled to release one post a week. I’ve alluded to personal issues as well as outside pressures, but I feel like I owe more to the folks who regularly show up for their dose of gaming news, thrilling unboxings, and half-baked opinions.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on a playtesting project recently for Conflict Simulations Ltd, or CSL (Afrika Army Korps (Conflict Simulations Ltd, ~2025), which I wrote about back in August). This has taken an an inordinate amount of time, with a couple of false starts and hiccups. I think this will be winding up soon, and I should have a follow-up post to the aforementioned in the next few weeks.

With The Hammer, coming soon from CSL. Cover design and
game artwork by Ilya Kudriashov

This has been a serious commitment on my part, not just in time but also in bandwidth. I’ve been doing a lot of historical research into the African theatre, and I’ve found myself devoting a lot of thought to the game when I’m not actually engaged with it physically. This has all been at the expense of appending time on new games and on writing about those games (I don’t want to over-egg my participation in the project, I’m just a play-tester, but I do take it seriously and try to contribute where I can). I had told myself that I would back away from playtesting for a bit and concentrate on the blog. Then last week, Ray Weiss from CSL put out a call for play-testers for With the Hammer, a game he was working on celebrating the 500^th anniversary of the Great Peasants’ Revolt in Germany (this will be Ray’s second game concerning the subject but will likely be available first). The play isn’t as complex at Afrika Army Korps – the game should play out in under ninety minutes – and I’m fascinated by the asymmetric aspect of the conflict, so I’ve put my hand up for that as well. This should take a lot less time (there are more folks working on this one). It’s an intriguing game and I’ll be sure to post some pics and thoughts in due course.

From a recent CSL newsletter.

On a personal note, my wife’s mother is not expected to be with us much longer. This is the family issue that has been taking up some of my time. Jess's mum has a brain tumour; she’s managed to outlive her initial six-week prognosis by more than three years with a positive response to early treatment and irrepressible joie de vivre, and most of that time has been pretty much on her own terms. But the last few months have been very hard on her, and that inevitibly takes a toll on those around her. I've been a part of the family for twenty-five years; we've always got along well, and I already miss her.

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So, where does this leave A Fast Game? Going forward, I’ll be trying to quarantine more time for writing (and playing games I’m not actively playtesting). The Acquisitions department has been profligate lately, due to the sale of some old RPG materials that have been taking up space, and so I now have a backlog of games that deserve unboxing posts. I’ve been sitting on A Most Fearful Sacrifice: The Three Days of Gettysburg (Flying Pig Games, 2022) I’m starting to wonder if I’ll end up doing a double header with The Rock of Chicamauga (Flying Pig Games, ~2025). Normally I like to break up the unboxings with other posts, but between now and Christmas, that will probably be what you see the most of, including a couple of absolute gems. I also have a couple of reviews I’d like to finish before Christmas, but I make no promises at this point.

Lastly, a little rant (this is the complaint of the title). I’ve been eagerly awaiting delivery of a game (that’s not like you, Jon, I hear you say). It was another CSL game; Imperial Bayonets: Solferino, 1859: For Liberty and Lombardy (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2024), the follow-up to Mr Weiss’s Imperial Bayonets: We Were Not Cowards: Sedan, 1870 (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2020), which I still need to write about. For Liberty and Lombardy covers several battles in the Wars of Italian Unification, a subject of particular interest to me, and I was eagerly awaiting its arrival.

That was until I checked the tracking details, and found out that the package had already been delivered a couple of weeks earlier – slid under our gate and well into the courtyard, as the driver’s photograph indicated – and somebody had come along after and stolen said package from this “secure” place. This was the first time we’ve lost a package to porch piracy, and we’ve had boxes of wine left at our door when we’ve been out. I get it, it’s the price of doing business in Kansas. What burns me up the most is whoever took it probably just binned it when they found it wasn’t electronics or whatever the hell else people get shipped to their door.

I’ve been fuming about this for a week, but I’m trying to let it go. It’s not like I haven’t got enough to keep me busy for a while.

If there’s a message in this, it’s this: use your time wisely. Make time for family and friends, and find ways to let them know they’re important to you without getting weird about it or making them uncomfortable. And try to not tie your happiness to things, but to experiences and time shared. Here the rant endeth.