2026 Q2 Report: A little willingness to venture

 

Color guard of the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team standing
at attention while their citations for bravery are read, near Bruyères, France,
November 12, 1944. (Source: Britannica.com)

Have courage and a little willingness to venture and be defeated.

— Robert Frost

2026 has hit its half-way point, and it’s time for another quarterly report. These missives are really just for my own benefit; they help me to help take a tally of where I am and what I’ve been doing, both gaming- and blog-wise. I’ll make assumptions about what I’ve played or received in the mail, but then when I go over the records, my memory’s out of whack. I mention this to say that I won’t resent anyone not reading this. It might be a little dry and somewhat self-indulgent, but if that’s your thing, read on.

 

Incoming

This is what I was talking about in the intro – Looking back over the last three months, I was sure it had been a relatively quiet quarter for incoming games; I counted five new to me titles, as well as the Update Kit for Mr President (GMT Games, 2023) to bring it in line with the Second Edition (GMT Games, 2026). Then Queen of Spies (Salt & Pepper Games, 2026), which I’d backed during its Gamefound campaign, arrived a couple of days before the end of the month (I thought it wouldn’t be here for a few weeks).

Queen of Spies. Unboxing forthcoming.

In truth, I received nine games, plus the Mr President update. Regular readers would have noted the saga of the January GMT order, but in short, I was able to run out to the Australia/New Zealand distributor (handily located here in Adelaide) and get the part of the order that had arrived. For me this was Ardennes ’44, Fourth Edition (GMT Games, 2026), Purgatorio: Men of Iron Volume VI (GMT Games, 2026), and the Mr President update. In that batch was a copy of the Men of Iron Tri-Pack (GMT Games, 2020) reprint for my brother-in-law, T. This, too, had its issues (an Errata Replacement Kit will be forthcoming).

Purgatorio. You can get a look at what's inside here.

In a moment of feverish excitement, I impulsively ordered Guerre Eclair (Nuts! Publishing, 2026), directly from the publisher within a day or so of its release. The price was very good, although the shipping cost wound back most of that advantage, but in fairness, the package arrived in just a little over a week and really nicely packed. Guerre Éclair is the third in Nuts!’ Combat Rations series. True to the blog-title, I like a fast-playing game, and this promises to live up to that.

Speaking of fast games, the other titles received are all second-hand purchases (though four of the five were unpunched on receipt). These were the GMT Deluxe Edition of one of Pushing Cardboard host Grant Linneberg’s favourite games, Blue vs Gray (GMT Games, 2023), and four zip-loc games Blitzkrieg Unleashed: The Battle of Sedan – May 13-14, 1940 (Hi Flying Dice Games, 2002), Blitzkrieg Met: the Battle ofStonne, May 15-16, 1940 (High Flying Dice Games, 2011), Green Berets: War in the Central Highlands 1964-1965 (One Small Step, 2001), and  Warsaw 1920: Lenin's Failed Conquest of Europe (Revolution Games, 2020). And before you ask, with the best will in the world, I have not as yet managed to get any of these to the table. Their time will come.

Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (Prussian Army expansion), Placenoit scenario.

 

Games played

Last quarter, T and I didn’t catch up for a game at all (I’ve written about why that was here, so I’m not going to dwell on that here). Since Easter, we’ve been playing Commands and Colors: Napoleonics (GMT Games, 2010) nearly exclusively twice a week – twenty-five games in all – and all scenarios from the Continental Army expansions (this makes up somewhat for not getting any games in through Q1). We punctuated the run with a couple of palette-cleanser games of Battle Line (GMT Games, 2000) Century: Spice Road (Plan B Games, 2017). I’ve posted a string of AARs on A Fast Game, which must be tedious for readers who aren’t a fan of Napoleonics. Sorry about that – I’m trying to get back to a more diverse spread of subjects.

The Italian Wars, Scourge of Princes style.

What I haven’t been writing about is a new miniatures rules-set we’ve been playing with the Wednesday group, Scourge of Princes (Sam Mustafa Publishing, 2026), which shamefully does not yet have an entry on Boardgamegeek.com. Scourge is subtitled, “The Birth of Modern Warfare: Machiavelli to Cromwell,” which is a broad scope to tackle with a single rules-set, but having played scenarios set during the First Italian War and the English Civil War, the overall rules capture the general nature of battle across the period, while situational rules-tweaks applied to the periods covered (such as freer movement options for cavalry in the later centuries) lend a sense of verisimilitude to the eras while keeping a fairly low rules overhead.

Royalist troops (English Civil War)...

and Cromwell's New Model Army (Scourge of Princes).

There’s one more game we played with the Wednesday group just recently which was a revelation. I own the earliest editions of the three European Conflict of Heroes games, Awakening the Bear: Russia. 1941-1942 (Academy Games, 2008), Storms of Steel! – Kursk 1943 (Academy Games, 2009), and Price of Honour – Poland 1939 (Academy Games, 2010), which I scored as a job-lot. I enjoyed the game, but I haven't played it in an age, and was considering selling it, but just last week, I played a buddy's Awakening the Bear – Operation Barbarossa 1941, Third Edition (Academy Games, 2019). It was a revelation. It's a familiar game, but is just a bit tighter and more thrilling. The beauty of Conflict of Heroes is one can play the older editions with the Third Edition rules (downloadable from the Academy Games website); the only drawback is they require a customised ten-sided die for each side. Bless the Internet - two people had posted .STL files to make your own custom d10 for the game. Now I just have to find someone who can print me a couple. 

Blog matters

I’ve been slipping a little this quarter, posting only twenty-one pieces, about seven a month. Putting it that way, it’s not quite as bad as it first sounded – that’s nearly two a week (honestly, it felt like less). These included four unboxings (I have a couple in various states of completion, but that need better photos of some of the components – even I have some pride in this regard. I also bored everybody with a string of C&C Napoleonics AARs, eight, posts covering nine scenarios. I burnt out a little before getting on to the subsequent boxes, but I might write up some of those. I also posted two Blog Notes (short posts about things that don’t fit into the regular, established categories). I’ll come back to these below, because they are each interesting in their own way and worth some extra consideration.

The rest of the posts were interviews. This was a new thing last quarter. A Fast Game’s first interview, with Yasushi Nakaguro, which I posted in February, in February. In Q2, another four have appeared, almost accidentally; Mr Nakaguro sent me a copy of Bansai 28, which featured the Award Value Proposition for Wargame Publishers article I posted to the blog last year, and the featured game in that issue was Brian Trains Balkan Gamble (BTR Games, 2015; Bonsai Games, 2026). I read Mr Train’s blog regularly and we’ve exchanged comments in the past, so I asked if he would mind forwarding me the English-language rules for Balkan Gambit. When he did, I though Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and asked if he’d be willing to participate in an interview, to which he said yes, but he had some work across the country, so after that.

Bansai 28

Around the same time, Grant Linneberg had been renovating his basement to become his new game room and studio. Mr Linneberg is responsible for the excellent Pushing Cardboard podcast and YouTube channel. I’ve written about wargame collection development in the past, and I thought this was a great opportunity to talk to somebody in the process of unpacking and reorganising his game library. Mr Linneberg agreed, and so his became the second interview for A Fast Game, published at the end of last Quarter. [EDIT: Mr Linneberg's interview was published in late March, and was mentioned as such in the report for Q1 - I had inadvertently flagged it as a Q2 contribution; more evidence of my flagging short-term memory.] The third was Mr Train’s, which appeared in April. Both were really a delight to work with, and I’m very happy with the results. 

I’ve been a fan of Nadir Elfarra’s art for wargames since I first got Dawn’s Early Light (Compass Games, 2020). Mr Elfarra and I have some mutual friends on Facebook, so I messaged him asking if he’d do an interview. I’m keen to highlight the artists that make our favourite games special, and so there will probably be more art-design interviews in the future. I’ll circle back to the third below, but there’s a bit more of a story behind it.

In the last quarter I hit a milestone that I mentioned in a Blog Note, but I kind of buried the lead there, so I’ll reiterate. A Fast Game hit 100,000 views about a week and a half ago (at time of writing). I must be doing something right because it only took me about eight months to add another 50,000 page views from my last milestone.

Being on Blogger, I’m not tapped into the WordPress fraternity that most of the other blogs I follow have access to. I have no members or subscribers, per se, just regulars and tourists. Thank you to everyone who stops by, and I hope when you do you’re all finding something of interest when you do. And thank you to all the who have contributed to that growth; I gave them all a shout-out here, so I won’t repeat myself of embarrass them further, but I am very grateful to all of them.

Now for some statistics, because this wouldn’t be a quarterly report without some random numerical values. I finished the quarter with a total of 101,464 page-views of 276 posts. Considering the interviews, I can no longer say “I’ve written X words,” so instead I’ll say that I have posted to the blog total of 439,058 words. A Fast Game, in its totality, is now somewhat longer than Don Quixote, though I have a way to go before reaching the length of The Count of Monte Cristo.

 

Two scoops

Reader, this quarter saw A Fast Game has take a few small steps toward covering some real news with two stories that hadn’t been covered elsewhere. In their May newsletter, GMT inadvertently listed The Napoleonic Wars, 3rd Edition (GMT Games, ~2027) as tentatively joining the company’s production queue in the fourth quarter of this year. There had been rumours of a reprint or new edition circling around the usual online haunts for six months or more, but nothing official had been announced (the title appeared again in the June newsletter).

I did apologise to the good folks at GMT, after the fact (better to beg
forgiveness than ask permission).

I’m sure other people noticed this, but so far as I’m aware, I’m the only one who wrote about it. I posted a Blog Note about the inadvertent announcement here. Feeling cocky, I posted a link to the note to the Official GMT page on Facebook. This has become the most-read piece I’ve posted to A Fast Game, clocking a little over 700 direct views in the first 48 hours. At time of writing, it’s registered over 1,000 views, plus the 200 or so it would have received from folks wandering in through the front door while it was the latest post.

In the subtitle I mentioned two scoops. The second actually came out of the first. As an afterthought, I asked readers to mention in the comments what other games they would like to see GMT reprint. The second comment mentioned the one game that comes up every time somebody mentions reprints. Downtown: Air War Over Hanoi, 1965-1972 (GMT Games, 2004) is a perennial wish-list candidate with a particularly strong reputation. It won three separate categories in the Charles S. Roberts Awards for 2004. A string of games have leveraged Downtown’s systems to explore new theatres, from Bloody April, 1917: Air War Over Arras, France (GMT Games, 2012) to Red Storm: The Air War Over Central Germany, 1987 (GMT Games, 2019). But in more than twenty years, no reprint. I decided to find out once and for all if it might come to pass.

I follow Downtown designer Lee Brimmicombe-Wood on FB, so I cold-called him on Messenger and asked the question. I admit I was a little surprised when he replied, and his answer prompted another question, which he graciously answered. Rather than pepper Mr Brimmicombe-Wood with further random questions and risk is just blocking me, I asked if he’d be willing to do an email interview. He agreed.

I recommend you go read that if you haven’t. It’s an interesting read (and a salutary lesson in the importance of thoroughly researching the topic). And it definitively answers the question of a Downtown reprint.

 

Extracurricular activities

I’m staying away from playtesting for the foreseeable. I have been thinking about the Cesare Borgia game I’ve been tinkering with, but nothing solid (it’s still pretty much vapourware – don’t look for it anytime soon). I haven't given much thought to the further scenarios for Afrika Army Korps (Conflict Simulations Ltd, 2025); they are on the backburner for now.

 

Next steps

As I said, T and I have been playing “All Napoleonics – all the time.” Commands & Colors: Napoleonics is T’s go-to game, and twice a week, nearly every week since Easter. Apart from the aforementioned reason, I’m using the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the Continental Armies expansions. We’ve played around half a dozen or more scenarios each from the Austrian Army (GMT Games, 2013), and Prussian Army (GMT Games, 2014) expansions, and are currently working through the Russian Army box (GMT Games, 2013). The three national army expansions are now set for reprint as a combined set in a BIG box. There’s not a lot of critical consideration of the Continental army expansions in the wild (beyond casual musings over playthroughs, so the plan is to present something like a review of each box on the blog. I’m part-way through the Austrian Army write-up; I had hoped to get that one at least up before the end of Q2, but I should be able to post all three will be up before the end of Q3.

With a lot else going on, I've been slack at tabling new games this quarter. I'm planning to turn that around in Q3. I'm not going to commit to firm numbers, but I'll write something about each one as it happens. 

I won’t have any further interviews planned at the moment. I do have a line on one that’s been taking longer than I expected, but I won’t mention who it is in case it doesn’t come off as I don’t want it to reflect at all badly on them. I never meant for interviews to become a regular feature, and I’m a little surprised I managed four in the space of three months. But if the opportunity arises, I’ll be happy to follow it up.

I’ve been a little distracted from posting in the last couple of weeks because I’m spending a chunk of free time gathering data for A Fast Game’s next research project. I don’t want to say too much this far out, but I’m hoping to get a proper article posted in the second half of August, though there may be some slippage in that time-line depending on how quickly I can gather the information I need. Like my last research piece, I’ll include the full methodological details and such. And like my last article, this one is drive purely by my own quirky interests, but I think this one will have broader appeal to the regular readership. Unlike the last one, I’m planning to release as much of the raw data as I can in a set of follow-up posts. For more, you’ll just have to wait until it's online.

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Thank you, long-suffering reader, for persevering this far, and generally for showing up and checking out A Fast Game. Honestly, I’d probably still post if I didn’t have a regular readership, but it’s nice to think somebody will see it and maybe even have a chuckle. If you have read this far, either pat yourself on the back or pour yourself a double.

2026 Q1 Report: Supplies and Demands

 

 

9th Division Army Service Corps, Tobruk, September 1941
(Courtesy of the Australia War Memorial).

Three months into the new year, I find myself feeling like a bit of a fraud. A Fast Game began a blog about playing wargames, but there hasn’t been a lot of games played lately. Life, family illness, and associated stresses intrude on plans, or weariness overtakes the planner. Either way, I’m left with feelings of guilt over missed opportunities. This leaves me in a funk, a little black terrier growling and pulling at my trouser leg.

Writing is the best salve for this funk, but I’ve been wilfully ignoring this avenue out of Achillean stubbornness (I’ll come back to this later in the post). I think I’m digging my way out of that funk now. The terrier is in the corner, chastened but alert.

Overall, I’m a little disappointed with my written output these last three months – the quantity thereof, of the quality I’m quite chuffed – and dissatisfied with my own participation in the hobby. Through the course of preparing this report, my view of the last three months of A Fast Game has softened a little; I do feel like I’ve achieved some joy in some areas, in spite of not meeting my own expectations in others. On balance, it hasn’t been a bad quarter.

 

Incoming

In previous quarterly reports, this section has been called Games Purchased, but most of the arriving games in a given quarter have been ordered and paid for in advance, sometimes a year or more earlier. So, I’m changing it to “Incoming” partly in keeping with a martial theme, partly because some quarters it can feel somewhat like a barrage.

Overall, I’ve received twelve wargames and two expansions/supplements in the last three months. Q1 2026 was the Quarter of Big Boxes. No less than three games arrived in 12” by 12” shells (see the photo attached). A GMT P500 order arrived with two Mark Simonitch games (and a mounted board for Italy ’43 (GMT Games, 2025)) and Unconditional Surrender! Western Campaigns (GMT Games, 2025). I also received Battle Commander, Volume 1 (Sound of Drums, 2026) and its first expansion, and Gallipoli: Ordered to Die (The Dietz Foundation, 2025), both crowdfunded through the usual channels. 

Q1 haul. Not pictured; Bansai 28, Paper Wars #84 (Autumn 2016). 1846: The Race for the
 Midwest is an honourable mention. I've never played an 18XX game, and the price was
very good, so I grabbed this and 1777: Year of the Hangman (Clash of Arms, 2002)
as a job lot.

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that Brian Train’s latest COIN game, China’s War (GMT Games, 2025) was subbed-out for another title I won in a raffle draw. I was particularly heartened to receive a contributor’s copy of BonSai Games’ Bansai 28. I’ve bleated about this enough – you can read about it here – but, but by happy coincidence, it included a a revised edition of the game Balkan Gamble, also designed by Mr Train. He was kind enough to forward me the English language rules and scenario details (the game covers four planned but unexecuted invasions of Greece/Yugoslavia between 1943 and 1950). This is near the top of my to be played.  And as if the gods themselves smiled down on the exchange, a copy of Mr Train’s Finnish Civil War (Compass Games, 2016) in issue 84 of Paper Wars arrived (with Battle Commander, but that’s a story for another time) on the same day as Bansai 28. China’s War arrived the following week.

The others were opportunistic purchases, on my part – get ’em before they’re gone. I've already posted an unboxing of War & Peace, Seventh Edition (Avalon Digital, 2025); the others will be forthcoming.

 

Games played

This will be short. And embarrassing. In the last three months I think I’ve played maybe nine games or less to completion, depending on how you define complete. When I’m playing a game two-handed, I’ll sometimes stop when a probable conclusion is clear, when it would be impossible for one side to make it out of the hole they’ve dug, and those last three or so rounds would just be a slow attrition, delaying the inevitable.

I’ve also played out the first couple of rounds of a handful of games, only to pack them up again before I’ve reached the meat of the game. These last three months have been a season of disruptions. This happened twice with The Battle of Blenheim, 1704 (Legion Wargames, 2018), and twice again in the last several weeks, with Battle Commander, Vol 1.

French Regulars and Guard advance on brittle Spanish militia (Valour and Fortitude).

T and I haven’t met for a game since a couple of weeks before Christmas. We thought we may be able to squeeze one in tonight (the last day of March), but circumstances would not permit. The reason for our extended break is also the cause of much of the stress across the extended family these past months, and a big contributor to my not clocking more games recently.

Something I have played quite a bit these last three months is minis games. I participated in a couple of miniatures games using the Valour and Fortitude rules (Perry Miniatures, 2022), which is fast becoming the go-to rules for a sweep of periods. This quarter we’ve played an American Revolutionary War action and an early Peninsular War game.

Not quite a free-for-all (Jugula).

We also had two consecutive weeks of Gladiator games, Spartacus: a Game of Blood and Treachery (Gale Force Nine, 2012), which was mechanically elegant and a brilliant engine builder but didn’t blow my socks off, and Jugula (Studio Tomahawk, 2014), which did. Spartacus is more about building your ludus and stabbing your competition in the back, and the side-spectacle of the gladiatorial combat almost a distraction. Jugula is all arena combat, with a brilliant card-based system where the deck both offers advantages and determines your fate at each exchange of blows. If swords and sandals are your thing, hunt down a copy of the Jugula rules and decks (you’ll need one deck for each team, but there are lots of options for your team).

We who are about to die... (Jugula).

 

Blog matters; or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the box

This Quarter I’ve posted just nineteen entries to A Fast Game (including this one). In my last Quarterly Report, I mentioned I was hoping to improve the posting count from 2025, but that Quarter I put up twenty-two posts all up. There are a lot of little contributing factors at play here, but I want to look at one here in particular.

Like I said at the start, I started A Fast Game to talk about playing games. In spite of barely getting any table-time in the last three months, I still think of myself as a wargame player rather than a wargame collector. So, it wasn’t much of a shock when I realised unboxing posts made up a third of the entries posted in the last three months (compared to just two AARs), and three of those went up consecutively. This isn’t really a problem– I treat unboxings like a community service and try to make them informative and entertaining – but lately I’ve been hyper-conscious of A Fast Game starting to look like a big advertisement. Or the online equivalent of a used car lot.

I have about four unboxing posts in various states of completion and could probably have upped the quota for Q1 so something like last year’s levels, but I realise now I’ve been self-editing my posting. I’ve got four games that arrived between January and now that I’d like to write up, as well as another eight or ten from last year. If I had pushed through and finished some of these, I probably would have felt better overall about the blog, and would probably have written more overall, not just the unboxings. I hope I’ve turned a corner with actually playing games, but I’ll also try not to let my embarrassment form not posting AARs get in the way of posting unboxings.

Another thing regulars may have noticed is I’ve added a new, if infrequent, feature to A Fast Game. Q1 saw two short-form interviews, with designer/publisher Yasushi Nakaguro and social media impresario Grant Linneberg. This is something I’be been thinking about for a while. I want to present short interviews with a relatively concentrated focus on a given subject. I’m still finding my feet a little with it, but the reception so far has been encouraging. I’m currently lining up another interview and have a few other subjects in mind. It will stay an infrequent addition to the stable, but expect to see more of these.

Early action in the Battle of Montebello (Battle Commander).

The other big news is that just yesterday (at time of writing), A Fast Game passed the 75,000 visits mark. To put that in context, starting out I just about reached 500 views in the first six months of posting (and I think about 10% of those were me making sure all the links worked live), and about fifteen months all up to get to 10,000 views.

The view count is a pretty high-level metric and doesn’t mean much; in a previous job I was responsible for reporting on a handful of metrics, and the Marketing division was in love with the overall site visit metric because it just kept going up, in spite of the fact that the actual number of visits per month was circling the drain.

I don’t know how many of those visits result in the reader glancing over what’s on offer and digging further or just bouncing off and checking out YouTube videos instead. A Fast Game isn’t monetised, and I don’t want to pay for Google Analytics, so I can only extrapolate from the meagre data provided in basic Blogger.

The simple analytics you get with Blogger show you the Top Referrers and Top Referring URLs – who is sending readers your way, and how they are getting there. These usually pick up less than ten percent of the overall visits for a given duration (I have it set up for the last week’s activities). So, while I get readers from recommendations on other websites, the majority seem to come through the front door; that is, the come to the general blog address and see whatever I’ve posted most recently, then sometimes they’ll go rummaging through the back-catalogue.

Traffic report.

As I’ve said previously, I’m really appreciative of the mentions I get on other blogs and elsewhere (you know who you are), but the bread and butter of the blog is people who presumably have A Fast Game bookmarked and drop in every other week or so to see what’s going on. In this case, the referrals are gravy, and I return the favour when I can. Referrals must be how most people find A Fast Game in the first place. A Google search for <”a fast game is a good game” blog> brought up half-a-dozen links each to old Armchair Dragoons’ Tuesday Newsday posts and GMT Games’ product pages, but no direct link to the blog (I’m sure this would change if I turned on Adsense).

I mostly write A Fast Game for myself. I go down statistical rabbit holes and chase down obscure facets of art history because that’s what interests me. But the knowledge that people are coming back to read what’s on offer, and occasionally even comment on it, brings its own reward. Thanks for coming along.

 

An international audience.

Extracurricular activities

Nothing to report on this front. If I haven’t had the time or opportunity to play wargames, I certainly haven’t had the capacity to play-test anything. That may change in the future, but I can’t promise anything.

 

Next steps

Last year I wrote the first part of what I envisioned would be a three-part exploration of Block Wargames, why and how they do what they do. It started as a two-parter, but after rethinking it, I edited down the second part and posted it under the title Not Created Equal: a Block Wargame Primer, Part 1 – Commands & Colors; an odd place to start, but there you go. I’ve been meaning to get back to it for a while, but I’ve finally started to sketch out a couple more chapters (to make it a four-part series in all, maybe five if I can maintain the momentum), and I hope to get at least another one up on the blog before the end of June. I may even rework the first chapter to bring it more in line with the others (no promises there, I hate reworking old material).

I’d like to do another research article as well; I have an idea of what I’d like to look at, but I’m struggling with the methodology. If I can crack that nut, you may see another long-form piece later this year.

In the meantime, expect to see more unboxings, hopefully some AARs, maybe another interview or two. I especially can’t make promises when other people are involved – I’m at the whim of their schedules and commitments. The interviews are fun to do, and after I fire off the first batch of questions, I can get on with something else until I get a reply.

So as always, expect more of the same. Thank you for reading this far, and for coming back to A Fast Game if you’re a regular. If you can keep showing up, I should be able to keep it interesting. And I’ll try to be less morose this quarter.

 

 

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.