By the Numbers: GMT P500-order shipping costs to Australia

 

Notes: This is just my own rationale regarding the cost of shipping. This is a subject I’ve touched on before, and I’m sure it will come up again at irregular intervals. It’s timely, because I’m just about to get charged for a P500 order, and there were last-minute changes to the weight estimates that threw out my initial calculations.

In this post, I will be looking exclusively at the Australian situation. I don’t seem to get a lot of readers from New Zealand, but if there’s any interest, I’ll do a follow-up on the New Zealand situation. New Zealand deliveries come through the Australian distributor, VR Distribution, so they cost a little more.

Unless otherwise stated, ALL the currency values represented here are in US dollars (US$ or USD). The Australian dollar has been jumping around too much to make a reliable estimate of translated prices on anything. If you don’t live in Australia, this probably won’t be all that interesting for you, and I won’t be offended if you skip it.

Nine pounds of promise.

Point of origin shipping to Australia/New Zealand Canada, Europe, Japan, and Asia/Pacific Rim was announced in the September 2025 GMT Update* (the Overseas Shipping Matrix can be found here, but you’ll need to scroll down to the bottom of the page). This significantly reduced the shipping costs of P500 games, compared to shipping with UPS from the States. The downside is delivery is by surface – container ship – rather than air, so we’re talking delivery on months, not weeks.

I’ve heard – well, read – people complaining on the internet that shipping is still very high. I get this. While the A$ has strengthened against the US$, but it’s still roughly three-to-two once you work in exchange costs and so on. I get it, but I have to disagree. Still order P500 game because they are generally a little cheaper than ordering from local or overseas sellers (not every time, but often enough to wash out toa net gain) and because, even with the longer shipping times, they still tend to arrive earlier – months earlier – than in Australian stores. There’s one more reason; Some of the games I order are pretty niche (even within the niche of wargaming). There is simply no guarantee that a given title will be picked up by local sellers.

This post was borne out of prepping an order for myself and two friends, charging in a couple of days (late March). I had to juggle my own order and drop two titles because of cash-flow issues (a Sophie’s Choice moment for me), but sometimes you just have to make some hard decisions. As happens sometimes, the weights of nearly all of the games in the order had gone up by one-to-four pounds each, so something had to go.

This got me thinking about the actual shipping rates. When I’m ordering for other people as well, I’ll work out the overall weight, divide the shipping cost by the weight of the overall order, then times that number by the number of pounds that person’s share of the order comes to. This is the most equitable way to work it out. The other way to do it would be to count off your buddy’s pounds first on the chart, because they’re the most expensive ones, and ride on the back of that. But that would be a dick move, and I put some effort into not being a dick.

But this got me thinking about how much bang you get for your shipping buck. I had a feeling that the sweet spot for value for money would be around 16-20 lbs, but I didn’t have the numbers to back that up.

Below is an extract from GMT’s Shipping Matrix, looking at just the Australia-Friendly P500 shipping costs listing the weight-parameters and costs; most cost divisions scale between two and ten pounds. That’s to the left. To the right are the costs per pound (in USD). To the right are the costs per pound at the lowest and highest number of pounds within the bracket.

The numbers don’t lie. To be honest, I’m a little surprised my feels more or less proved right, though, depending on how you measure it, you could argue the “sweet spot” is roughly between 14 and 30 lbs total weight.

This of course doesn’t take into account how much you’re paying for your games, which is, the P500 case, is probably going to be the greater share of the cost. I’m not advocating putting oneself into hock to save a few bucks on shipping, but I hope this will help my fellow Australians put the cost into context.

I have a list of thirty or more things ordered on P500 at any given time, a literal list in a Word doc with the current estimated weights and pre-order prices, and I try to monitor any changes as they come up. Personally, I always cancel an order when it’s just one item. But I nearly missed the weight revisions to the games in the latest order. The Grand Battles expansion for Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2026) was revised up from five pounds to nine; that alone jacked up the shipping by around $40.00 (two copies ordered), and all the other games in the order had gone up in weight estimate from one to three pounds. I’m not railing on GMT over this – caveat emptor – but I would like to see these increases signalled somehow beyond simply changing the number on the product page. If I nearly got caught, there must be others, and some of them may be operating on an even slimmer margin than me.

In the end, the order has come out to five boxes, of which three are for me, and one each for two fellow gamers. To be fair, all the items ordered are pretty hefty; the lightest is Baltic Empires (GMT Games, 2026) at six pounds, the C&C Naps expansion being the heaviest, so the total nominal weight of the parcel will be 38lbs, which comes to US$168.00 in shipping.

Let’s look at a single case. One of the Grand Battles sets is for me. At nine pounds, the shipping cost for that comes to $39.78, roughly two thirds of the (P500) price of the box (closer to half of the MSRP). Combined, the game comes to $98.78. In my provincial currency, this translates to roughly A$145.00, and I’m okay with that. $4.42 (about A$6.25) a pound isn’t too bad in the grand scheme. To put it in context, I’m looking to send a paperback overseas. The book is about 300g (a little more than half a pound). It turns out, that book is going to cost around A$25.00 or so – about double the cost of the book – so A$6.25 per pound for overseas shipping feels like a bargain.

Every wargamer, especially us Antipodean wargamers, have to make up their how mind about how much a game is worth, or more accurately, how much we're willing to put up for a game. I’m okay with spending a fair chunk of change on two games** and an expansion that promise a lot of replayability, but we don’t have kids or a mortgage hanging over our heads, and I really don’t have much else going on. As they say, mileage may vary.

 

* Actually, I think the new programme was announced in an earlier update, but the Shipping Charge Matrix went up on the GMT website around the time of the September update.

** Full disclosure: along with the Naps Grand Battles expansion – my brother-in-law T is getting the second copy – I’ve ordered The Three Days of Gettysburg (GMT Games, 2026) and Thunderbolt Deluxe (GMT Games, 2026). I dropped a copy of Baltic Empires because I couldn't justify the outlay, and my buddy B is getting the ordered copy, so I will still get to play it sometime. I'd already 
dropped Army of the Potomac (GMT Games, 2026) because of all the games being released this round, that’s the one I’m most likely to be able to purchase locally.

Next year's words: three years of A Fast Game

 

 

Saint Jerome in his Study, by Albrecht Dürer. While undeniably a beautiful work by a pre-
eminent artist, I think we can comfortably assume Dürer had never seen an actual lion.

 

"For last year's words belong to last year's language. And 

next year's words await another voice."

— T.S Eliot, Little Gidding (Four Quartets)

 

Three years ago today, I launched A Fast Game is a Good Game. Three years later (today) I can say with some pride that A Fast Game is still up, and still (fairly regularly) presenting new – and I hope interesting and informative – material. I went into it with a couple of specific goals, one of which was to see out a full year. A Fast Game began as an adjunct to another wargame project, but over time it’s morphed into its own thing, and three years on, people are still visiting and reading the blog; in late October A Fast Game reached a milestone of 50,000 views, a figure I hadn't expected to reach until I was some way into 2026. Now, at the end of it's third year, the blog just topped 65,000 views. In the last year A Fast Game has received more than double the number of visits the blog had gotten in its first two years combined. Many of those visits are the result of the continued support of good folks like Rachel at GMT Games, Jerry from the Cardboard Commander blog and podcast, and Brant from the Armchair Dragoons. Thank you, all.

If you want a potted history of how we got to here, you could do worse than read last year’s anniversary post. That should bring you up to speed without getting too deep into the tall grass – I’m getting better at keeping my indulgences brief. You could say the blog began with a misunderstanding, and I’ve been buggering things up since. But along the way I’ve learned a lot, played quite a few more games than I otherwise might have, met some interesting, like-minded folks, and had a lot of fun.

Evidence of a quiet evening in, clipping Desert Blitzkrieg (Compass Games, 2025).

A Fast Game runs to two cycles. Regular readers will know I keep a calendar-year record, and present various wargame- and blog-related goings-on in a quarterly report (the next will be due at the end of March, if you’re interested; if you’re even more interested, you can click on the “Quarterly Report” subject heading in the column to the right and be confronted with all of them, starting with the most recent). But my first post for A Fast Game, went up on January 31, 2023, so this (today, I mean) is the actual anniversary of the blog, and it’s become a thing to me to mark the date with an entry separate and apart from the usual stuff.

Year three has been a mix of good and less good. We had a death in the family late 2024 that cast more of a shadow over the last twelve months than any of us were expecting. That and a third bout of COVID (not as bad as the first two, but awful enough), along with other less serious ailments kind of set the tone for the year, which had an impact on output for A Fast Game.

I haven’t written as much this year as I did in the one previous, but more than in the first year of A Fast Game. At the beginning I thought two posts a week, about a hundred a year, would be workable. I nearly made this count in 2023-24, but the number has steadily dropped over successive years, with 2025 being punctuated by long gaps, sometimes a fortnight or more. Still, I’d rather post worthwhile content than make targets, but I am going to try to maintain a more regular output. Here are the relevant numbers.

 

* The first post to A Fast Game was supposed to go live on February 1, 2023,
however, due to the vagaries of International Time Zones, Blogger disagreed,
and so the official launch date is the 31st.

If A Fast Game was a novel, it would be a bit longer than David Copperfield, but would fall somewhat short of Don Quixote. Over the last three years, I’ve written ninety-four After Action Reports, fifty-seven unboxings and twenty-seven reviews. I’d like to up the number of reviews, try for twelve to fifteen a year. I also don’t write up every game I play. I do try to capture the interesting ones, and those that highlight something the game does well. I also have three or four more unboxings to write up even now (as well as some new games due this quarter). Stay tuned.

As for the coming year, I’ve already written at length about my abbreviated plans here (with a minor amendment here), so I won’t rehash all of that, except to say that I hope to get more games in generally this year than last. I’d like to spend some time working on something bigger, like last year’s research project or 2024’s two-part rumination on how to build a wargame library, but at this stage I have absolutely nothing in mind. I’m open to suggestions if anyone has any thoughts.

I intend to wind back spending money on new games in the coming year (though that’s what I said in 2025). As a result, you may see some more time and attention spent on older ones. Or to evoke Eliot once more:

“We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring /

Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”

 

 

By the Numbers: Games played in 2025 (keeping score)

 

Record sheet from a fifteen-inning game between the Universities of Michigan
and Santa Clara, back in the day.

I wasn’t looking forward to preparing this post; while I’ve mostly kept up with writing about wargames here at A Fast Game, I’ve been feeling a bit like a failure in the actual playing of the games, writing what feels like a lot of unboxings (nineteen this calendar year, as of posting). I’ve often made plans to tackle a new game or revisit a favourite, only to have sickness, family responsibilities, an opponent’s sudden unavailability, or some other circumstance to nix those plans.

When I started pulling together the numbers, I was a little surprised. In truth, I’ve had a better gaming year than I had first thought. A couple of years ago, I started keeping a week-to-a-page diary, mostly to write down what games I had played (I also have a poor memory for ephemeral details). Working through this year’s journal, I realised I’d managed more games overall than I’d previously thought. It’s down from last year, but the overall count wasn’t as dismal as expected.

So, without further ado, let’s talk numbers.

 

Wednesday group

I have two regular gaming commitments in the normal run of things, and both have been a thing for more than a decade and a half. These are my regular Monday night game (though as often as not, it gets pushed out to Tuesday, occasionally Thursday) with my brother-in-law, We’ve been doing this most weeks since 2010. The other is an established Wednesday night group that I joined in 2008 as an RPG group, but that in the last six or seven years has been mixing up the game itinerary to include minis and board games. I’m deeply appreciative of both of these opportunities, and I know I’ve got it better than a lot of wargamers.

Taking the fight to the rebels. American Revolutionary War,
fought using the Valour & Fortitude rules.

Due to sicknesses and some other commitments, the Wednesday group only convened thirty-eight times this year. Twenty-one of those evenings were spent on Role Playing Games; there was a resurgence in RPGs with the Wednesday group compared to last year, but RPGs are what brought that group together in the first place. We played five RPGs, all new to the group, and all varying levels of fun and interesting. But we’re not here to talk about RPGs.

I’m proud to say I’ve been a part of the Wednesday group for seventeen years next March. In that time, we’ve played a lot of wargames (mostly minis), but it’s not a wargaming group, and I can’t count on getting my fix here. In 2025 we played sixteen non-RPG games all up (over seventeen weeks - we played Border Reivers: Anglo-Scottish Border Raids, 1513-1603 (GMT Games, 2023) and a six-player game of the Berg/Simonitch classic, Successors (Phalanx, 2021) each over two weeks), spread over nine games. Of these, five were minis games, two what I’d class as functional wargames – Border Reivers and Undaunted 2200: Callisto (Osprey Games, 2024), and two were co-operative franchise games with rather silly names but were nonetheless quite fun if I’m honest. We also played El Grande (Hans im Glück, 2015), of which David Thompson said he considered “the perfect game,” and wondered why anyone would bother making other games after playing it. Thankfully Mr Thompson has ignored his on position on this.

Undaunted 2200: Calisto. Familiar mechanics, new challenges.

I also got a couple of games in with Wednesday night host, B; two games each of Commands & Colors: Medieval – Expansion #1 Crusades Mid-Eastern Battles I (GMT Games, 2024), and The Hunt (Salt & Pepper Games, 2023). There was talk of other games, but each time plans slipped, or difficulties emerged. We managed to get a couple of games of The Hunt into an hour or so before our regular Wednesday night start-time, so that might be something we can replicate in the future; I’ve got a stable-mate of The Hunt, Operation Barclay (Salt and Pepper Games, 2024) that would fit the bill.

 

Monday night games

Illness and international travel took a toll on Monday night gaming with my brother-in-law, T through 2025 as well. When we started catching up for a quick game on Monday evenings in 2010, we averaged around meeting forty weeks out of fifty-two. In recent years that batting-average has become harder to achieve.

The battle of Lake Antioch (a thrashing for the Seljuq Turks). We played
a lot of C&C: Medieval - Crusades this year.

In 2025, we managed just twenty-six. Twenty-five of those sessions were wargames (sixteen of those, some flavour of Commands & Colors), but a few weeks ago, after a string of defeats and draws, T pulled out Century: Spice Road (Plan B Games, 2017), in which he maintains an unbroken string of wins since our second ever game.

 

Alone again, naturally

When I get a new game to the table, it’s almost always a solo endeavour (Breizh 1341 (Shakos, 2022) was an unusual exception to this). Sometimes I’ll dive straight into a game if, after going though the rules, I feel confident about it; I did this with Pacific Tide (Compass Games, 2019), and more recently, Drop Zone: Southern France (Worthington Publishing. 2025). But more often than not I’ll give the rules a onceover, have some non-directed play to familiarise myself with the workings of the game before I try to set up a scenario.

When a new game (or an unpunched second-hand one) arrives I’ll usually make a photo log of the components – not every game I purchase has got an unboxing here, but I like to be prepared – and ideally punch and clips the counters (at this point I have about a dozen unpunched games, but nearly all of these are bigger games, like Death Valley: Battles for the Shenandoah (GMT Games, 2019) that involve six or more counter-sheets, and that I haven’t sorted out storage solutions for yet). The smaller ones I’ll usually punch and bag immediately, and these are the ones I will tend to break out to just push some counters around and get a feel for the game  I don’t usually keep a record of these noodling sessions because it’s not really playing the game in the proper sense, and I tend to lose track of the games I start off this way. It does still warrant engagement with the game, however superficial, so I should be keeping track of these instances. I know this year I’ve gone that with All Are Brothers, Solforino, 1859 (Legion Wargames, 2025), Stalingrad Roads (Nuts! Publishing, 2024), Panzer Battles: 11th Panzer on the Chir River (Multi-Man Publishing, 2016), and some others, but I’d estimate I’ve done this with fourteen or fifteen games this year. For the sake of the stats, I’ll keep it to the eight or nine I can remember starting out like this. 

Gaming avenues	Wargames	Other	Total
Monday night (T)	25	1	26
Wednesday night (group)	12	26*	38
Other contested games (opponent)	-	7	7
Computer games	15	-	15
Solitaire	7	-	7
Try outs	8†	-	8
Totals	67	34	101

      * This count is in weeks played rather than games played.

        † This is an estimate based on the games I can recall. The actual number was maybe               another half-dozen or so instances higher.

 

The Spread

Now for a little analysis. This will cover just the full games I played, not the less serious noodling engagements. I have included what I think of as non-wargames, in this list, though technically the only two with no direct conflict, either between players or players vs. game, are Century: Spice Road and Odin’s Ravens (Osprey, 2016).

I played a total of thirty different games played in 2025 (plus five new RPGs). Only three new, physical games hit the table for a full play this year (five new games in all – I played through the entire eight scenarios of Bill Kalapoglou’s Arete (Molotov Cockatiel Games, 2025), which I’m hoping to write something about not far into next year, and another 2025 release, Rebel Fury (GMT Games/Hexes of War, 2025), which technically isn’t a new-to-me game, but was on a new platform. Two of the new games played were on my Ten Wargame Challenge list, but only one of those, Drop Zone: Southern France, was a new game. The other was Agincourt from the Men of Iron Tri-Pack (GMT Games, 2020). T was so impressed with the game he’s getting a copy in the second printing (which is scheduled for release in January ‘26).

It should come as no surprise that I got a lot of Commands & Colors games in through the course of the year. For our Monday game, if we’re playing at T’s house, nine times out of ten C&C-something will be set up and ready to go.

Dawn's Early Light - one of the non-C&C games we managed to get to get in
on a Monday evening. Or maybe a Tuesday.

So, the results are better than I anticipated. If I count all the times I’ve engaged with a game even superficially (which is still “playing” maybe just not with all of the rules yet), I’ve managed about two games a week. I have to be happy with that. I would have liked to get some more new games to the table, but there's little use in repining.

I’ll look a little more closely at some aspects of my gaming year in the last Quarterly Report for the year (I’ll add a link here when it’s posted on the blog). In this post, I just wanted to look at the numbers. You’ll have to wait for the rest of the story.

 

Simply the best?

I’m not a Top Ten person – I don’t see the value in pitting favourites against each other, though I can understand the appeal if you're a content creator looking to generate comments on your posts (I appreciate all the comments I get, but I'm not going to cajole readers into making them; I'm grateful enough for you all showing up). I’ve been lucky this year to have played a bunch of games that I’ve enjoyed at some or another level, not as many or as varied as I would like, but this is something to work on. Having said that, a couple of game experiences stood out. Here's something from the highlights reel.

Most played game

Hands down, Commands and Colors: Medieval – Crusades exp. Over a dozen plays over the course of the year, but we still haven’t worked all the way through the included scenarios. I’ve posted a lot of AARs for C&C-Crusades this year, as well, not every game, but the most interesting ones.

 

Best new (to me) two-player game

Drop Zone: Southern France. Dan Fournie has a talent for making fast-playing but nonetheless challenging and quite addictive games. I cite 1944: Battle of the Bulge (Worthington Publishing, 2020) as just one example, but Drop Zone was a labour of love for the designer; his father was among those who jumped into Southern France in the opening stages of Operation Dragoon. This game plays out quickly and smoothly, but success must be earned by either side.

American (green) and British paratroopers land, ready for a fight.
Drop Zone: Southern France.

I’ve only played this solo, and I’d like to take it out a couple of times with different opponents before I write up a review. In the meantime, I look forward to whatever Mr Fournie chooses to turn his design hand to next.

Honorary mention: Breizh 1431. Another taut, frustratingly good game that is done in an hour and takes up a quarter of the table space of Drop Zone.

 

Best new (to me) multi-player game

I really enjoyed Border Reivers, but the standout for me was Successors. For the wheeling and dealing at the table, it reminded me of Republic of Rome, but the game was much less abstract, with sieges to lay and alliances to break. A tense game right up to the last turn, but still a lot of fun. I think something that added to it was less than usual whining at the table – with six players, there is always somebody who feels they’re being unfairly put upon. There was still some of that with Successors, but with less longevity. Everybody could see that everybody was getting a kick in the ribs at one time or another; luck and fate were equal-opportunity obstructions.

The rather austere cover of the fourth edition of Successors, released by Phalanx. 
The image, and the square box put one in mind of an obscure Nordic Metal band. 

Honorary mention: El Grande. I don’t think I’ll ever be as big a fan as David Thompson, but this was a surprisingly deep game with multiple avenues to victory that didn’t outstay its welcome.

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.