It's been a while since I felt it worthwhile writing a retrospective on my gaming year. The last time I wrote one was in 2017 and I . This year has been different though. I've managed to play a fair bit, although all of it was solo. The reason for this is that I moved to Norway to work in the middle of 2020 and have spent a large part of the last 18 months working from home thanks to the pandemic. The pandemic has meant that I have not sought out other gamers, and have focused largely on games that are designed for solo play or that have a solo mode. This has largely meant boardgames, because the pandemic has also meant that moving all my lead and paints to Norway has not been a practical option yet. We'll have to see what happens with my contract at the end of the current project to see if it is worth making the effort, assuming that travel becomes easier again in the future.
2021:
So, on to the games. I've copied and pasted the table below from BoardGameGeek. The numbers are the number of sessions of each game I played.
As you can see, Gloomhaven has occupied a massive amount of my time with 122 sessions this year and I wrote about it earlier this year. Each session is one scenario or one attempt at a scenario in the cases where I lost miserably. I have loved this game despite carrying it home from the games shop almost killing me. I have plans to use the components from it for other games, and I may well return and try the campaign again following the paths I did not take this time around.
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| Gloomhaven |
Beneath the Med and Thunderbolt/Apache Leader each occupied 11 sessions. In the former case, I played through one campaign to the point where my sub was sunk and my captain died. I pushed my luck too far! I need to try this one again and be a bit more careful. It's an interesting game, fairly repetitive and much of the action happens in your head, but I think that the stories it encourages you to tell yourself are a large part of the fun. Thunderbolt/Apache Leader saw me play two short campaigns. It's a lightweight game with interesting decision making that feels a lot like watching Airwolf. Well, to me it does anyway and the theme tune plays in my head each time I play. I need to write more on each of these games later, so will try to write up each as I play the next campaign.
I finally bought the update of RAF this year. As you would expect, it is a game about the Battle of Britain. You manage fighter command and must allocate resources to the defence of England in 1940 to prevent the Axis forces from bombing the country into submission. I successfully completed this mission. One interesting aspect of the update is that there are options for taking charge of the Luftwaffe and also for playing this as a two-player game. I wrote up my thoughts on RAF earlier in the year.
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| RAF |
Field Commander: Rommel saw me fighting my way to victory as Rommel in France in 1940 and in the Western Desert. For some reason I have never written this game up, but I really should. It's an interesting game, but perhaps not my top choice for pulling off the shelf. I think I need to be in the right mood for it.
I wrote about my experience with Heroes of Telemark earlier in the year so I shall not repeat myself on that.
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| Heroes of Telemark |
I had a sudden urge to play big stompy mechs, for no earthly reason that I can fathom, so I bought the Battletech: Beginner Box and Battletech boxed sets this year. I've played all the scenarios in the beginner box, but not the full fat versions yet. My thinking was that I could use the mechs in the boxed sets and the standees as figures for games of Horizon Wars and 5150 No Quarter - Mecha Combat, as well as actually playing Battletech. I hope to organise myself properly to do that in 2022. We shall see ...
Finally, for the boardgames, I played a session each of Space Empires: 4X and Terraforming Mars. Both are fun, and I want to play them more in 2022.
Miniatures gaming has been much thinner on the ground this year. My miniatures remain in the UK, as I noted before, so I have only played miniatures games while in the UK. With travel being difficult, I only got back last Christmas and in the middle of the summer. And, when in the UK, my time is limited, so games tend not to get played. I played the first two missions from Rangers of Shadow Deep, flew a test space fighter mission in Fistful of Lead: Starfighters, and played one mission of Five Parsecs from Home. These are all games I would like to see on my table more, but I really need to sort my living and work arrangements out properly so I have my stuff in the right place to take advantage of them.
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| Five Parsecs from Home |
One thing that does not show on BGG because it is not listed there is the Scarlet Heroes RPG. I've returned to my solo campaign after a significant break and have continued from where I left off. Running it and writing it up is a fun way to fill the odd half hour. I also enjoy creating the maps in CC3+, although one of the reasons the campaign foundered previously was precisely because I found the map-making burdensome. I'm not sure what has changed, but it just seems to go together more easily now. I'm scheduling weekly posts for it, so that I can take a short break if I need to without the flow of the game being interrupted. This campaign is a massive hit of nostalgia, being set in the Basic D&D world of Mystara.
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| Scarlet Heroes |
All in all, this has been a good year for gaming. I am very pleased that I have played each of my new games at least once, and have had good use out of several of them. That is a novelty!
2022:
For 2022, I would like to try to fit in more miniatures games but know that will be difficult unless I can arrange to move figures and terrain to Norway. I fear this will be more complicated with the rules that will apply to UK/EU/Norway goods transport from 2022, and I am wary of getting hit for import duties for moving my own stuff across borders. Also, the cost of postage puts me off sending some figures by mail and my luggage for the return is already too heavy, so that is not a realistic option. Yes, I am a cheapskate! What do you expect from someone brought up in Scotland and Yorkshire? This would all be a lot easier if the Newcastle-Stavanger ferry were still running. Despite it being cancelled in 2008, long before my move to Norway was on the horizon, I still feel this as a personal affront! We'll have to see what I can organise.
A simpler miniatures option at this stage is to use the Battletech stuff for a selection of mecha games, so there is a good chance that will happen. Hurlbat's reprint of Micro Ancients offers another option for miniatures style games, possibly using the rules that come with them, or perhaps Neil Thomas' One Hour Wargames.
Having received the Fantasy Fistful of Lead hardback for Christmas, I shall aim to use the Gloomhaven miniatures and tiles for some FFoL dungeon bashing. I have a bunch of other skirmish games that they might be useful for too. I'll have to see how I fare with FFoL first.
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| Fantasy Fistful of Lead Collected Edition |
Related to these miniatures games, I am going to have to be less fussy about terrain and table. The Battletech maps will do nicely for mecha games, so it might be worth getting a few more of those, but I am going to have to be less fussy about terrain, table and miniatures. I should try printing out 2D terrain to make a readily portable terrain set that can be stored easily. Printable standees are also an option worth exploring, especially for the disposable baddies in my games. I am also tempted to create battle mats in CC3+ and print those out. I have long thought that it would be fun to create 18th-century style maps to play Seven Years War games on, and that idea could be extended to other periods and genres.
On the boardgame front, I want to get The Dark Valley and War Without Mercy onto the table. Both deal with the Russian front in WW2. The Dark Valley has a chit draw mechanism that should make solo play easier. War Without Mercy is a fairly standard game so I shall just have to play it two-handed and try to be impartial or use dice rolls to determine how high command prioritises its attacks for each side. I am tempted to draw on Charles Stewart Grant's Programmed Wargames Scenarios for ideas on how to deal with this. Nothing too complicated, but at least it should inject some chaos into the proceedings.
Beyond these, I shall aim to play the various games I have more, rather than looking to buy new games. And I plan to continue the solo RPG. I've bought the D&D Rules Cyclopedia hardback and GAZ 1 The Grand Duchy of Karameikos softback from WargameVault to use with the RPG, having previously only had digital versions of both. It's just a shame I cannot get the Karameikos poster map easily.
So, that is the plan for 2022. It is fairly open with just a few specific games I would like to play, and as much of a moratorium as possible on buying new stuff. Hopefully, I shall be enthused enough to write a retrospective next year and see how well I have achieved my aims.
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