A Fast Game’s Second Anniversary – Looking back, looking forward

  

The 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras - Elizabeth Thompson (later Lady William Butler).
The original hangs in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and it really
quite impressive; it's over 2.1 meters (85 inches) across. This facsimile
doesn't do the painting justice.

 

 Note: If you're a regular visitor to this page, You willl have noticed I haven’t posted anything in over a week. I’ve been putting my time into helping out with another project that I can't I can go into at the moment (though I've alluded to it before), which has taken up the majority of my spare time, but I think will be worth the effort. Normal transmission should return shortly (within a week or so), but I had to take some time out from the other thing to note this blog’s birthday. Thanks for reading, and for sticking around.

 

Today marks the second anniversary of A Fast Game. That in itself feels like something of an accomplishment. The blog has evolved over the last two years; it began as a form of self-accountability and has grown into by turns a forum for airing ideas about wargames, a fan page for games I’ve enjoyed and want to tell others about, and occasionally a spleen to vent. It’s been a ride, but it’s been fun. But how did we get here?

In 2022, I was feeling a little dissolute, cast adrift. I don’t want to dwell on that, but, coing off the dull terror of COVID, I felt like I was going through the motions, barely showing up in some of areas in my life, including with gaming. It came to a head in the second half of 2022.

I’ve wrestled with – I don’t want to say depression because I think that takes away from the acute depth other folks’ experience of depression – I’ll call it “the glums” for much of my adult life. Not all the time, but periodically. This was happening around the same time; I couldn’t say if it was the cause of the adrift feeling or a product of it. It’s never too serious or debilitating, and eventually I realise what’s going on and I manage to snap myself out of it or look for the tunnel with the light at the end of it.

There are always things you can’t exert any control over, and others that you can. I’ve become better at recognising one from the other, and I’ve found that working on the ones you can influence is a good way to push through the glums. I realised one of the things that was weighing me down was my game collection. I had a lot of games that I’d punched, read through, maybe even pushed a few counters around to get a feel of play, but never actually played. I identified something I could do something about, so I grabbed a shovel.

I’m a spreadsheet guy, and so I made a list of the games I owned and marked off the ones I’d played. At that time, I had I had around 220 or so games all up, mostly wargames or games that involved some kind of economic conflict. I left the RPGs out of the equation. I typed up all the titles and put a tick next to the ones I’d played at least once. The result was around 19.5% played. If I incorporated the expansions for games like Combat Commander (GMT Games, 2006), Band of Brothers (Worthington Publishing, 2011), and the Commands and Colors expansions, the result nudged up to a little under 22%. SO I'd barely played one in five games I owned, even just once. This, I decided, was something I could do something about.

I decided to find a way of making myself play more games. I’ve written before about hearing about the War Room’s Ten by Ten challenge for 2022 around the same time, and how I misinterpreted the “10x10” to be ten games, played ten times each. I didn’t think I could pull that off, so I settled from a more manageable 6x6 challenge for myself. I picked six games, and declared to my gaming buddies that I was going to try to play them six times each. I had a plan.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised if I was going to stick it out and actually see out the plan, I needed some kind of mechanism of accountability. I blogged when I was at university, then when I was working in the same university. I had form, and I had a preexisting Blogger account (I thought about using Wordpress for broader exposure, but didn’t want to commit to paying for something I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep up). My first post talked about why I was starting a blog (a longwinded version of some of the above). The sixth post announced I was changing one of the games in my 6x6 list, because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get another two players together six separate times for Churchill (GMT Games, 2015), and settled on Undaunted: Normandy (Osprey Games, 2019).

By the end of the year, I had failed my self-set challenge, completing six plays of only two of the games, but A Fast Game had taken on a life of its own. I posted reviews twelve games by the end of 2023, written dozens of session-AARs, delved – however shallowly – into the philosophy and psychology of wargames, and generally had a lot of fun, both gaming and writing.

In 2024 I played around forty games I hadn’t played before. I don’t know if I would have got to that number if I hadn’t been writing A Fast Game. Blogging is easier than maintaining a YouTube channel because there’s a lot less outside pressure to produce new content every week (honestly, I don’t know how Grant from The Player’s Aid manages to contribute to both the channel and their blog).

For me, A Fast Game is a creative outlet, and a way to give back to the hobby and the community that’s given so much back (including kind messages from a handful of designers and artists for my generally positive reviews of their work). 2024 was tough on me and my family, but the blog – and the positive feedback from readers – has helped me tunnel out of the dark.

This is a sample of the (rather superficial) analytical data I can access regarding
A Fast Game. For what it's worth, the blog isn't in any way monetised. And I'll
mention again, I don't accept review copies of games or any other free stuff.
Not that anyone has been offering.

I’m not obsessive about numbers. Not normally. But I was coming up to a milestone of sorts at the end of 2024, and so I’ve been monitoring views of A Fast Game over the last month or so, and I can repost that a couple of weeks ago the blog hit 20,000 views. This is a long way from The Player’s Aid blog, which reported over 4.8 million views in their eighth anniversary post back in April last year, but it brought me a little joy in a way that arbitrary numbers sometimes do.

Speaking of numbers, this will be my 174^th post to A Fast Game. This time last year I had hoped to reach 200 posts now, but life and other projects intervened. I’m okay with that. Well. I’m not okay with going more than a week without posting anything – I try to put up two or three posts a week, but that’s been difficult in the last eight or ten months. I don’t think I need to apologise for the breaks in transmission, but I do think I’ll be turning a corner soon, getting back to a more regular schedule.

One of the four Ten Game Challenge games, I've played before and am eager
to get back to: Rebel Fury (GMT Games, 2024).

For the year ahead, I’ve only made one commitment. I’ve come full circle and have pledged to complete this year’s War Room Ten Game Challenge (having a clearer understanding this time of what is involved). This year, the Challenge is to play ten games out of a selection of twelve (ten primaries, with two subs in case something prevents you from nailing all the first ten – you can find my list here). This I think I can do, as it works out to be less than one game a month. Having said that, I‘ve yet to play my first, while some of my Brothers in Challenge are moving on to their fourth already. I’m not panicking yet, but I need to move on it. I’m hoping to get my first to the table in the next day or two and post an AAR early next week.

I posted ten game reviews in 2024, but I had aimed to get twenty up. I’d like to lift my game on reviews this year, maybe twelve or fifteen, but these are the hardest posts to write; they require serious consideration, more editing than other posts, and I try to get some original photographs to illustrate the post. Also, I will only post a game review if I’ve played it at least three times. I wanted to get a review up of the Crusades Expansion (GMT Games, 2024 - not the proper name, but that's what everyone thinks of it as) for Commands and Colors: Medieval (GMT Games, 2019), but with four plays now, I still feel I’ve barely scratched the surface. I’m going to have to skip to the last third of the scenarios and play another three or four scenarios with the Knights Orders to really get into the marrow of the game before I’m comfortable taking about it.

The trap is sprung: Hab, 1119 (C & C Medieval Expansion 1:
Crusades Mid-Eastern Battles 1).

I’m not planning on getting too funky with A Fast Game. Along with reviews, I’ll still post Session AARs (for the interesting games, at least) and unboxings, which are about even with reviews for popularity. So a reliable more-of-the-same, which the occasional drop down a rabbit hole, as the whim takes me.

So, if you’re new, welcome to the blog; if you’re an old hand, welcome back. I’ll try to keep it interesting and at least sometimes funny. I’ll also try to be positive – I’m not going to waste my time or your attention on something I don’t like. If I’m talking about a game here, it will be because I see some value in it. Your opinion may differ, and that’s okay. Keep reading and we’ll probably find some common ground.

I'm tremendously grateful for the restorative effects of maintaining A Fast Game, and for the readers that regularly visit the page and lend me the impetus to keep it up. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading to the end. You can stop now, but come back again from time to time.

 

 

Obligatory introductory post

It’s suddenly 2023 and I’m wondering where the time has gone. But I’m getting ahead of myself. My name is Jonathon. I’ve been a wargamer since… well, let’s just say, it’s been a long time now. Not as long as some, but a while all the same.

My first wargame was Titan Strike (No. 3 in SPI’s Capsule Game series, 1979) which was a lot of fun – I was a sci-fi nerd – but left me unfulfilled. I soon graduated to a second-hand copy of Modern Battles II (SPI, 1977); all four maps covered (really well) in clear Contact and the whole thing rolled up in a tube with the rules and counters. I had to provide my own dice, which wasn’t as easy then as it is now (I was fourteen and broke). These were followed by Strategy & Tactics and Ares Magazines with their incumbent games, starting with Barbarian Kings (Ares No. 3, SPI; even as a teenager I exhibited pronounced brand loyalty). Around the same time my friends and I discovered RPGs, and so began my lifelong devotion to Traveller, but I always found time for both.

I hit something of a gaming drought generally in my twenties, moving states twice in four years, earning a degree, getting married and the host of other things that life throws at a person when they’re just trying to make their way in the world. Eventually things settled down, and slowly I came back to both RPGs and wargaming, as well as general family gaming (my wife’s family have always been big on games; not the types of games I was used to, but a step up from Monopoly.

About fifteen years ago I joined up with a group of like-minded souls for a weekly game. This started off as almost purely role-playing, but has developed into a shared space for RPGs and boardgames. I’m also lucky enough to have a near-weekly game with my brother-in-law, Toby. This started while my wife was in hospital for several months, as a kind gesture to cheer me up a little and make sure I got a home-cooked meal once in a while, but has kept going since. For the first six or seven years, Toby and I played Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT, 2010) almost exclusively. We’ve both got quite good at it and are a good match, both in skill and temperament; a win is always an accomplishment, a loss an opportunity to congratulate the victor and plot revenge. More recently we’ve (I’ve) tried to mix it up a little, mostly with other flavours of C&C. Occasionally, I’ll even sneak in something like Time of Crisis (GMT, 2017) or a game from Worthington’s Blue and Gray Campaign series (Worthington Publishing, 2016).

Like a lot of folks in our hobby, I own a lot more games than I’ve actually played. I’ve managed to get some to the table at least once, some maybe a half-dozen times, but the majority (around 70% – I made a spreadsheet) I haven’t played one single time. Not even a two-handed learning game. This is something I’ve become acutely aware of in the last eighteen or so months. We live in a smallish apartment, and storage space is a premium. I used to buy games on a notional “I’ll get to this one when I retire” basis. Well, I’m in the semi-retired or pre-retirement or some such stage of my life, and those games are starting to haunt my waking hours. It’s actually beginning to feel unethical to have shelves of games I’ve bought, unboxed, fawned over and read through the rules of but never actually got to the table.

So, it’s suddenly 2023, and I’m wondering about a lot of things, actually. I tried to distract myself one day from thinking too much by opening Facebook. I noticed a few people in various gaming groups – from the Boardgame Geek group to hard-core wargaming outfits – proudly presenting their 10×10 lists. They all wrote like this was the most natural thing in the world and so everyone must know what they were talking about, so – former librarian – I did some digging. I realised that these were my people, folks that owned more games than they’d played, felt guilty about it*, and so they’d selected ten games out of their existing collections, with the intention of playing them ten times each, over the course of the calendar year, and were announcing this to their peers so they would be held accountable for this declaration of intent.

This is something I could do, I thought. So, in a burst of enthusiasm I started to put together a list. I soon realised I wouldn’t be able to make ten runs at ten different games in the space of a year; there just wouldn’t be enough year. I could, I thought, maybe do six games six times each. That, I thought might b doable. I looked through my collection, made a list, and posted it on Facebook in a group devoted to geographically local gamers. I was excited. I was elated.

Then I looked at the list again, and I thought to myself, What was I thinking?

I picked six wargames (it being a wargame group, and for the fact that I enjoy wargames, I own a lot of wargames, and I would like to play more wargames.

My List was as follows (and in historical order):

• This War Without an Enemy (Nuts!, 2020)

• French and Indian War, 1757-1759 (Worthington Publishing, 2020)

• Napoleon 1806 (Shakos, 2017)

• Great War Commander (Hexasim, 2018)

• Churchill (GMT, 2015), and

• Brief Border Wars (Compass Games, 2020)

I also threw in one as an honorary mention of 1960: the Making of the President (GMT, 2007), which isn’t a wargame, but it’s sat on my shelf for too long and I’d like to get a play or two in this year as well. What can I say? I’m catholic in my gaming tastes.

The problem showed itself when I looked at the list again in the cold light of day. Well, the next day. Churchill, but all reports, is a fine game. Some may argue that it doesn’t belong on a list of wargames because it isn’t a wargame. I don’t want to get into that here. My issue is that it’s a three-player game. It’s a struggle for me sometimes to get one more willing player to try a new game. Group game night is always four to five player games. No, Churchill must go. I’m still deciding what to replace it with; I have a lot of two-player contenders. The guidelines I set myself as I was making the list were:

• No doubling-up on publishers or designers (this was hard – I could have easily put together a list of just GMT, or just Worthington, or only Legion games)

• Interesting mechanics or new applications of familiar ones (new to me, at least); and

• Playable in an appropriately brief time. Nearly all my face-to-face games get played on week-nights; two-and-a-half hours is about the outside limit.

So, the blog. I figured if I’m seriously going to pursue this 6×6 thing, I should try to keep a record of it. Also, I make up for not getting to play so many games by thinking a lot about games. So this blog will probably turn into a channel for pointless ruminations about whatever I happen to have been playing or reading lately. The occasional rant might also be on the cards if something particularly grinds my gears that week (don’t ask me for an opinion on the whole WotC catastrophe playing out as I write).

One of the joys of writing a blog is not expecting anyone to actually read it. I’ll try to keep to a schedule of one or two entries a week, but won’t feel too guilt-ridden if I have to skip a week. I’ll try to keep it to wargaming, but sometimes other kinds of games may get an airing. I’ll keep a log of my ludological accomplishments, and around December, if I’ve enjoyed the experience, I might sign up for a second tour. If you’ve read this far, say hello in the comments. And if this seems like your bag, tune in from time to time. It could be fun.

* I may be projecting here.