A 2024 Retrospective

 So, 2024 turned out to be a good year for gaming for me as you can see from this list of plays I logged on BGG:

1. Dorfromantik: The Board Game (61 plays)
2. Five Leagues From The Borderlands: 3rd Edition (28 plays)
3. Rangers of Shadow Deep: Standard Edition (22 plays)
4. Rangers of Shadow Deep: A Gathering of Heroes (12 plays)
5. Warfighter Shadow War: The Modern Night Combat Card Game (8 plays)
6. Warfighter: The Tactical Special Forces Card Game (7 plays)
7. Kinfire Delve: Scorn's Stockade (5 plays)
8. Oathmark: Battles of the Lost Age (5 plays)
9. Western Front Ace: The Great War in the Air, 1916-1918 (5 plays)
10. Advanced Squad Leader (4 plays)
11. Solo Fluxx (4 plays)
12. Nothing Gained But Glory (3 plays)
13. Firefly: The Game (2 plays)
14. Solitaire ASL (2 plays)
15. Basic Impetus (1 play)
16. Chez Geek (1 play)
17. DreadBall (Second Edition) (1 play)
18. Wingspan (1 play)
19. Wizard Kings (1 play)

That's over 100 games logged using 17 different rules sets. The surprise hit of the year was Dorfromantik. I found a friend here in Stavanger who enjoys the game and the majority of my plays were with my friend, although I did play an entire solo campaign too. I just find it so relaxing to play. It's a beat-your-own-score game, so won't suit those that prefer defined victory conditions, but it does have a nice achievements element where you get to add new elements to the game as you score high enough or advance along the achievements track

I also had a friend visit me and we played Firefly and Chez Geek together, which was nice. Firefly worked two-handed but Chez Geek could really have done with a couple more players to make it interesting.

I am surprised that I have only logged one game of Wingspan, because I am fairly sure I have played two or three games of the physical game. We have environmentally themed boardgames nights at the university here and I usually wind up playing Wingspan at those, so there should probably be more plays logged. I don't log plays of the digital version or the count for Wingspan would be a lot higher. It is one of my go-to games for when I have 15 minutes and don't feel like doing anything else.

Beyond that, the poor long-suffering Steve endured a game of Dreadball against me, and I played an ASL scenario against my brother, but all the rest of my plays were solo games.

Five Leagues from the Borderlands and Rangers of Shadow Deep both provided engrossing campaigns in two completely different ways. I love the story of Rangers but I also love the sandbox nature of Five Leagues. If I had to pick one of the two as my preferred rules, it would be Five Leagues though. The combat is less swingy and the sandbox nature of the game offers much more replayability at the cost of having to develop the narrative yourself. Anyone who has read all my posts about the Thrappled Lemmings in Five Leagues will know that this is not something I struggle with. I would love to get my sci-fi figures and terrain moved out here, and start a Five Parsecs from Home game, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

Warfighter has a respectable number of plays to its name too. I like the standard game because you get to blow things up, and I like the Shadow Wars version because it rewards being sneaky. Both games are nicely cinematic and in my head I am an action hero when playing them.

Western Front Ace was a great game, and I am glad I have it. It's another game that relies on narrative to join your sessions together, but I got too attached to my last pilot and have not picked the game up again since he got shot down by a Hun pilot whom he never even saw. Perhaps enough time has passed now that I can pick it up again.

Oathmark turned out to be really good fun too, and I enjoyed the games I set up using the Charles Grant Programmed Wargames Scenarios book. I would like to do more with this, perhaps even setting up a solo campaign where I combine the scenarios in the Oathmark rules with the programmed options from the book.

The only game that was a bit dud for me this year was Nothing Gained But Glory. The theme of the Scanian war fits my interests, and the components and maps are lovely, but I tried it solo and it just did not work for me. This is a game where I would need an opponent to play against. Hopefully I can ask for one of those for Christmas.

A late contender was Kinfire Delve: Scorn's Stockade. I picked it up early in December and logged 5 plays in quick succession. It is not as quick to play as the small box suggests, but it works well solo and I am tempted to buy the other scenarios on the basis of enjoying playing this one. The game is billed as a dungeon bash, but is really a puzzle solver. In this, it reminds me of Gloomhaven. You have limited resources to get you to the end and to defeat the bad guy, so you have to maximise the effectiveness of your card use. While possibly not a game that will fit on the tray on a flight, it does not have a huge footprint and the box is small enough to carry with you while travelling and it will get you away from the screen for a while.That is always a bonus. I have way too much screen time at work, so playing analogue is always welcome.

In addition to playing boardgames, I have also managed to paint quite a lot of miniatures. My Vikings and Normans that I bought in the 90s are now mostly painted. I only have around 20 more infantry and 15 more cavalry left to paint and then I shall have painted all of those figures. it only took me 30 years or so! Should I catalogue them and realise that I am missing crucial figures for very limited and specific games that I could mostly avoid?

I've made good progress on my fantasy figures as well. These are newer, so I should probably let some of them age and ripen for another decade before painting them but I intend to expand these armies and I have a large Unpainted Lead Pile lying in my attic in the UK, so perhaps it is best to keep going.

So, that is my year in gaming. I have had a good time playing all these games and am delighted to have found at least one regular boardgaming partner here. It would be nice if there were 15mm gamers here, but I have seen no sign of them. Given the fun I am having playing solo, I don't really see that as a problem.

What will 2025 bring?

I imagine that 2025 will continue much as 2024 has, barring major upheavals in my life. I would like to get as many of my 15mm fantasy figures painted as possible and to play an Oathmark campaign.

Similar to the above, I would like to get all my battlemechs painted, my 6mm sci-fi figures rebased and many of those repainted, and I would like to use them in a campaign of some kind. I have a lot of different rules that would permit a solo campaign, and I am looking forward to seeing what the solo rules in Battletech: Aces are like. Hopefully they will be released in 2025 and I can try them out.

With the release of Mortal Enemies for Frostgrave, my final potential goal is a Frostgrave mini-campaign using the rules from Mortal Enemies to control enemy warbands. I have all the Frostgrave supplements to date, but no opponent in easy reach, so I have been thinking of adapting the Rangers of Shadow Deep bot to Frostgrave. The difficulty with that is the spells for the wizard and their apprentice, but Mortal Enemies offers a way round this problem. Rather than generate a single mortal enemy for my wizard, I can generate two or three enemies and dice to see which one turns up. This could be a fun way of playing the early campaigns that were published without needing an opponent.

Miniatures rules I would like to play in 2025 are:

• 5150: Mecha Warfare
• AD&D Battlesystem 2E
• Battle Suit Alpha
• Battletech
• Blood Eagle
• Frostgrave
• FutureWarCommander
• Hardwar
• Horizon Wars
• Oathmark
• Sellswords and Spellslingers
• Thud and Blunder

In addition to the miniatures games, it would be great to get more out of my boardgames collection. Specific games I feel I would like to focus on are:

• Barbarossa to Berlin
• Solitaire Advanced Squad Leader
• Space Empires 4X
• Terraforming Mars (especially with the new solo Automa expansion)
• The Dark Valley

I'm not adding War Without Mercy/Struggle for Europe series to this list because I have singularly failed to get it on the table for several years now, but I would love to give it a proper shot at some point.

It would also be fun to return to the adventures of Broneslav in Mystara. I need to get the maps made for the next story arc before I do that. Sitting at a computer at home working on maps is not my favourite thing after working on a computer all day at work, so we shall have to see if anything comes of it.

Obviously, I have a tonne of other games and figures stashed in my attic that I would like to play, but they are 1000 miles from me at the moment with little chance of getting them shipped over. One day they too can be taken into consideration when I plan my future gaming, but in the meantime they are there to ensure that I have something to do, if ever I can afford to retire.

With that in mind, the real goal for the year is to continue 2024's theme of focusing on one rules set at a time and playing it properly so that it feels like I am getting real value and depth of experience from these games instead of flitting between games at random. This is so much easier when I play solo and do not get caught up in other people's enthusiasms! There is still room for pick-up games in my life, but I want to prioritise depth over breadth as much as possible. I would also like to continue the weekly blog updates. How well shall I do, do you think?

Five Leagues from the Borderlands: Some thoughts after 60+ campaign turns

 The Thrappled Lemmings have completed their quest successfully but I feel like this is not a firm and final conclusion to the campaign. I almost want to carry on trying to complete everything that has shown up on the campaign map. My choice to end the campaign with the final level of the Temple delve was made at the start of the campaign. It was an arbitrary point to end it in some ways, but it also fits the narrative of acquiring enough wealth to retire. It is in the nature of a sandbox campaign that there is always something more to do, just like life. This is the real strength of Five Leagues from the Borderlands.

I have really enjoyed getting the campaign to this point. There was no point during the campaign where I could not be bothered. The random events, constant addition of new unexplored areas to the map, generation of contracts and quests and all the other things that happened along the way have built a  fun narrative for me. They helped make my party real as I decided how they should respond and what they should focus on. Of course, if you don't like roll and write type games, then the amount of dice rolling in Five Leagues from the Borderlands may not be to your taste. I still maintain that it is a very well constructed rules set.

While the campaign went well, there were a couple of negative things. The main one was choosing a mystic as my avatar. He was not as actively involved in winning the battles as I would have liked. As my avatar, I wanted Lysanthir to be a hero, not a supporting character. Part of this was the spells he had, but the rules are not written for wizards who use pyrotechnics and lightning bolts. Nevertheless, with different spell choices, he could have been more active in the fight and exploration. For a future campaign, I shall probably take a warrior as my avatar instead and have a mystic in support, unless supplements come out that have more offensive mystics.

The other main negative thing was that, at times, it felt like the hostile forces were too easy to beat. In part this is because I fought each hostile in increasing order of difficulty, but the party seemed to level up faster than the difficulty increased. Where my party did suffer, it was most often because I made mistakes, and only rarely because of really bad dice rolls. My willingness to use story points freely will have contributed to this. I used them to enhance the narrative rather than mechanistically. In a future campaign I might use Story Points more mechanistically and/or introduce some of the difficulty increases that the rules suggest, but then I am constant in my inconsistency and the narrative needs of the campaign could easily trump the mechanics once more.

All in all, I consider buying this game to be good value for money. I have played a lot and had a lot of enjoyment from it. That goes beyond just playing the games but to the whole process of collecting and painting the figures, making the terrain from the earliest stages of printed 2D terrain to sorting out nicer 3D terrain, and writing the story of the Thrappled Lemmings. I don't really enjoy painting figures, but this campaign has kept me focused on fettling old figures and painting new ones, and that has been a positive process with positive outcomes.

So, where next?

Lysanthir is nicely set up as a Friend/Patron in the campaign world now. He has a quest on the books, a Strange Map and some Vital Information that can form the basis of a new campaign. Wido is in a position to be a new party leader or to be a resource to be called upon for a new party. I have figures for factions that did not appear in this campaign waiting to be painted. That means that I could carry on in the same area exploring the unexplored areas, delving the undelved delves and following the unfollowed quests. I could also buy the supplement The Ancient Land of Dust and send a new party off there on a quest for Lysanthir to find out about the Serpentine Arts. I just wish this was available as a physical book and not just as a pdf. I am really not a fan of pdf documents for my gaming.

The plan is to mull over the campaign ideas for a while and see what most takes my fancy. As usual, the set-up will be a mix of what the rules say and what I think best fits the narrative. The only thing I am sure of is that I shall mostly start from scratch regarding my party so that I can try different options and see how they develop. Now, while I am mulling things over and preparing, what should I play next?

A 2023 Retrospective

 Unfortunately, 2023 ended on a bum note for the family, so it has taken a while to work up the enthusiasm to indulge in the obligatory retrospective. Because I am currently living in the wrong country, I seem to have managed a fair bit of gaming over the course of the year. Most of this was solo, and I realise that I have not logged plays of boardgames that I play on Steam, so Scythe and Wingspan are underrepresented in the list below:

Game	Qty
Five Leagues From The Borderlands: 3rd Edition	20
Thunderbolt Apache Leader	8
DreadBall (Second Edition)	3
Red Sand Black Moon: Fantasy Gladiatorial Combat	3
Chronology	2
Rail Raiders Infinite	2
Scythe	2
Super Dungeon Explore: Forgotten King	2
Calico	1
Hail Hydra	1
Laserburn: Sci-Fi Combat Rules	1
Warfighter Shadow War: Expansion #40 – East European Adversaries!	1
Warfighter Shadow War: The Modern Night Combat Card Game	1
Western Front Ace: The Great War in the Air, 1916-1918	1
Wings of War: Famous Aces	1
Wingspan	1

It should be no surprise to my reader that Five Leagues from the Borderlands is my most played game. I've really enjoyed the campaign so far and need to get back into the gaming headspace to continue the campaign.

There are worse places to live, even if I do not know any gamers here

Thunderbolt / Apache Leader is a solid second place. Again no surprises there. It's a game that is easy to pick up and put away as needed.

Dreadball is my favourite sports game. I just wish more people played it so that I could find opponents more easily. All my games of Dreadball were against the poor, long-suffering Steve. He deserves a medal! I hope to continue the Dreadball league next time I am back in the UK.

Over Christmas, Steve and I managed a couple of games of Rail Raiders Infinite and Chronology. Honours were even with each of us winning twice. Rail Raiders Infinite has a lovely chibi aesthetic. I wonder how much longevity it has though. Each session seemed quite similar to the last. Great for a pick-up game when you need a gaming fix in a hurry.

I find it odd that Warfighter does not feature much in the list here. I could have sworn I had played a lot more warfighter than this, but I must have forgotten to log the games.

All in all, it was a good year for gaming, and I got a bunch of figures painted too. Unfortunately I bought more figures than I actually painted but you take the victories where you can.

We'll have to wait and see what 2024 brings now. It has begun promisingly with several games of Western Front Ace and Nothing Gained But Glory (blog posts to follow) and I spent a bit of time sorting my Red Army counters for ASL into their luxury RAACO barracks. I have several copies of Beyond Valor and wanted to have just one full set of counters in the counter trays. This done, I plan to sort the German army next with a view to being able to play some Solitaire Advanced Squad Leader set in Stalingrad here at work. I also plan to return to the Five Leagues campaign soon. The goal for the year needs to be to stick to games I already play, which is likely to mean more of the solo boardgames I already own, due to lack of opponents. This will help my finances and make me feel better about the games I have. Beyond that, I am making no promises, because I have no idea what might take my fancy as the year progresses.

If in doubt, accessorise!

 I've been very busy for the past month or so, and have had little motivation to set up and play a game or to paint figures. It happens every so often. Also, the weather is nice here, so walking in the hills and visiting fjords I have not previously visited is higher on my list of things to do. However, I managed to stimulate my interest in gaming once more by buying a packet of foamboard!

One of my gaming goals is to focus on the figures I have rather than buying into new things. I've been quite successful in this. I've bought new rules like Five Leagues from the Borderlands to use with existing figures, and I have bought new figures to expand existing collections, but I have not been distracted by entirely new projects. Obviously, stopping expanding existing collections and ceasing to buy new boardgames would also be a good thing, but I have not quite managed that yet. One way to slow these processes down is to accessorise existing projects. This is where the foamboard comes in.

Over the past week I have cobbled together a dice tower and card holder for Warfighter, and a dice tower for Five Leagues from the Borderlands. They are built from foamboard and decorated with artwork from the respective games that I printed out and glued on. I could have spent more time resizing the artwork and making the images fit better, but, honestly, I just could not be arsed. The Warfighter dice tower was the first one I made, using a pattern from Instructables and it is a bit wonkier than the Five Leagues dice tower. If I make another, I am sure it will be less wonky still. Doesn't matter though. I have new dice towers and am satisfied enough with them. Also, dice rolling through the foamboard baffles sounds really cool. I need to stop rolling the dice to hear the sound long enough to actually play a game!

The card holder is from Adventures in Creative Software:

I needed to cobble together an insert for the Warfighter action deck using boxes the cards came in, because this card holder is not large enough for the 100 or so cards in the action deck, but it is functional and keeps the cards together better than just placing them on the gameboard. Like the first dice tower, the card holder turned out a bit wonky, but it is still satisfying to have for the game, and keeps the cards together.

2022 Retrospective

Happy New Year to my reader. Last year was a year of two halves. It started well but finished very badly on a personal level. We're still dealing with the fallout of that second part and it definitely affected life generally, although I still found time to game. I hope this year goes better and that you have a good year too.

Last Year

As is traditional now, it is time to take stock of my gaming over the past year, and to consider what the next year may bring. As is also traditional, the latter will be wrong and I shall do something completely different and unexpected purely on a whim.

So, here is the list of all the games I have played over 2022, listed from most plays to fewest. To make the table easier to read, I have deleted the entries for the expansion packs to games so that only the core set shows.

Game	Qty
Warfighter: The Tactical Special Forces Card Game	33
Dungeons & Dragons: Temple of Elemental Evil Board Game	16
Thunderbolt Apache Leader	10
Five Leagues From The Borderlands: 3rd Edition	7
Warfighter: The WWII Tactical Combat Card Game	7
Calico	6
Scythe	6
Wingspan	3
Command Decision: Test of Battle	2
Firefly: The Game	2
Hnefatafl	2
Root	2
Scarlet Heroes	2
Warriors of the Four Circles	2
Fistful of Lead: Core Rulebook	1
Warfighter Shadow War: The Modern Night Combat Card Game	1

 

As you will quickly notice, Warfighter has the most plays with the modern version scoring 33 games and the WWII version scoring 7, while the Shadow War version only saw 1 play. Still, that is 41 plays for the whole system. Not bad. I have really enjoyed playing Warfighter, and found it even more appealing once I had bought hardcopy of it rather than playing on VASSAL. VASSAL is great for a quick fix of gaming but I work on a computer screen all day and need to give my eyes a break when away from work. You can read AARs and my thoughts about the game on the blog.

Temple of Elemental Evil scored the second largest number of plays. I played the campaign all the way through and enjoyed it. There were parts of the game that irked me a bit but overall it was a fun way to play D&D. Unfortunately, I did not write it up. One of the reasons I got this game was for the tiles and figures. I already have the tiles and figures from Gloomhaven and I thought I could combine the two to make up some dungeon-crawling figure games. I still could, but I think that plan has gone by the wayside now. I note that in last year's retrospective, I stated this intention and I really have to laugh at my optimism and ability to stay focused on my goals.

Thunderbolt/Apache Leader had a few more outings. 10 this year versus 11 last year. It's a good game and is likely to see the table again next year when the mood takes me, but it is not really a game for sustained play. I am more likely to pick a campaign, play it and then put the game away again for another year.

Five Leagues from the Borderlands is doing well so far thanks to me getting my 15mm figures out to join me in Norway. This is the main reason that the figures and tiles from Gloomhaven and Temple of Elemental Evil have not been brought into play. The 15mm figures are quicker to paint and cheaper so my 15mm fantasy set is expanding at a rate that a 28mm fantasy collection would not, unless I opted for paper figures, as I did with Warriors of the Four Circles. I may start using paper miniatures for some of the rarer monsters in Five Leagues, but I plan to use normal figures for the whole game in the end.

Related to my 15mm fantasy gaming, the entry in the table for Fistful of Lead actually represents Fistful of Lead Fantasy, not the Core Rulebook, but the former does not exist on BGG yet. FFoL Fantasy is the only wargame I have played against an opponent this year. The poor, long-suffering Steve met up with me to meet his doom twice this year and both times we played FFoL Fantasy. The game really suits our style and fits well with the time and space we usually have to spare for a game on my rare trips back to the UK. I find that playing it at 2/3 scale on a 2'x2' board is perfect for us.

Along with 2 solo games of Command Decision, one of which got written up, that covers it for wargaming this year.

On the miscellaneous other boardgames front, I feel that I have forgotten or not bothered to record all the games of Root and Wingspan that I have played using the Steam app. One of my colleagues has both and is especially keen on Root, so we got her partner involved and played a few asynchronous (effectively PBEM) games. Good fun was had all round, and I have played a lot of games of both agains the AI on Steam too in addition to playing Scythe solo several times.

Calico was a surprise hit with my wife. She is not a gamer, but the theme and the pattern matching attracted her, so it got a few outings. She was also keen to try Hnefatafl which she bought me for Christmas last year, but that did not engage her as much.

On the roleplaying front, the solo adventures of Broneslav Torenescu have continued and are massively underrepresented on the table. I just never logged all the plays, but you can catch up on his adventures on the blog. I got stuck trying to map the next part of his adventure in Campaign Cartographer 3 back about the time he created a whirlpool of death in the streets and need to return to it. Once I have worked out how best to do the thing, he will return.

Looking Back at Last Year's Retrospective

Yeah, I never achieved what I said I was going to do. No matter. I got lots of good games in just the same.

Actually, it is not all bad. As noted last year, I made the decision to be less fussy with my terrain, and I have managed to transition to 2D printed terrain quite well thanks to really engaging with Five Leagues from the Borderlands. I have plans for more, easy terrain to expand my gaming options there, and hope to continue the Five Leagues campaign while it still has impetus. This has also encouraged me to return to painting figures, so that is pretty good.

I successfully continued Broneslav's adventures for two thirds of 2022, which is pretty good going by my standards. I'll take that as achieving the stated goal too.

With 103 logged game plays, and several more not logger, 2022 was a good year for gaming.

Looking Forward to 2023

For 2023, I would just like to maintain the impetus I have built up. That means carrying on the Five Leagues campaign, and returning to Broneslav's Basic D&D adventures to finish the B-series modules that I have been working on. Taking a break after the B-Series before starting the X-series would be ok. I could spend a bit of  time working on the maps during that break before starting the new adventures.

I would still like to get The Dark Valley and/or War Without Mercy onto the games table, despite failing in 2022. I would also like to play more Warfighter: Shadow War to really get to grips with it. These can be ongoing goals.

Finally, I hope to take more figures back to Norway to paint and get them painted. I'm going to focus on the 15mm fantasy for this because they are easy enough to paint and can be used with various rules sets. The focus will definitely be on Five Leagues from the Borderlands, but it would be great if I could play Rangers of Shadow Deep more too. I guess that will depend upon when the Five Leagues campaign reaches a natural conclusion rather than swapping between the two.

There are other aspects of my gaming that I would really like to do, but I am not sure it is realistic to plan to do anything with them this year. I simply do not have the time for everything, and being split between two countries makes it harder to chop and change between projects. This last is actually a Good Thing(tm) but is still frustrating. That said, the extension of my role for another five years does mean that I have a better excuse to ship more things out, providing that my wife does not think this means I am permanently moving out!

So, here's hoping I achieve at least some of this and that you manage to achieve your own goals for the year, and, hey ...

Restarting your game collection?

 I was over on BGG in my lunch break the other day and saw a thread about restarting your gaming collection. It caught my interest, because I often think about rationalising my collection with a view to playing what I already own more rather than spreading my gaming time thinly around . So, the premise is that you have lost all of your games in some catastrophic event. What do you get to replace them?

There is a lot of leeway on the original thread. No mention of being constrained by a budget or anything like that. I assume you would have to only aim for games that are actually available, but there's nothing wrong with dreaming either. What would you go for?

For myself, I am going to assume that the insurance paid up, which allows me to dream a bit bigger, but I would also be buying with a view to playing fewer games more often. My criteria for choosing the games would be based on the following:

• What am I likely to get the most use out of?
• What do I find myself getting down off the shelf and wanting to play even if I don't at that point?
• What do I find myself pottering with most, sorting counters or looking for storage solutions?
• Am I sufficiently nostalgic for this game to buy it?

That's a fairly broad group of criteria and there may well be other considerations. Looking at my peripatetic lifestyle, portability ought to be a consideration too, but I'm not going to think too hard about that. This is mostly about what springs gazelle-like to mind. I'm sure that long pondering would result in me remembering games that I once played and really enjoyed and might like to get, but this is about choosing games in the moment.

The first criterion points to games that can be played solo and with other people. I spend far too much of my time alone or in gaming deserts, so solo is essential, but I have always been more of a social gamer. That said, solo is also important because the types of games I want to buy tend not to be the ones that people around me want to play.

The second criterion points to hex-and-counter wargames for the most part. I enjoy Euro games, but I always wind up getting the hex-and-counter games down to paw over. This leads me to the third criterion where I find myself sorting counters and trying to organise my hex-and-counter games more than my Euro games. It also suggests that games with expansions and supplements should be part of whatever list I make.

The fourth criterion leads me to RPGs for the most part. I rarely get nostalgic for boardgames, perhaps because I still play them, but I do pine for the halcyon days of Basic D&D and Classic Traveller, hence my ongoing, but often intermittent, Scarlet Heroes solo game. I think the only boardgame I get nostalgic about is Terrible Swift Sword, a monster game of the Battle of Gettysburg 1863. I remember with fondness attempting to play this game to completion both solo and with a friend. These attempts never succeeded for a variety of reasons related to bad luck, accidents with the gaming table, and, in one case, a rogue sparrow.

With all that in mind, what would I get and why?

Scarlet Heroes

I would absolutely get another copy of Scarlet Heroes. It's the best fantasy RPG I know. It combines a modern streamlined design with old school nostalgia and is fully compatible with the old D&D modules. It is also designed for solo play, either completely alone or one player and one DM. For these reasons it would be top of my list for restarting my gaming collection. I would supplement this purchase with the PoD versions of the Basic and Expert D&D scenarios, and the accompanying Gazetteers. All of these would sit nicely on my shelf, can be played solo as I am showing with the adventures of Broneslav Torenescu, and could provide entertainment should I find someone else wanting to play.

Classic Traveller and 15mm Sci-Fi Gaming

I love Classic Traveller, and my first thought was that it would be second on my list. However, I do wonder if I would be willing to collect it all over again. From the perspective of starting all over again, I feel like there would be too much to do, because my Traveller gaming and my 15mm sci-fi gaming are both closely linked. I frequently use Traveller as inspiration for figure games or seek to set games in the CT universe.

This brings me to 15mm sci-fi gaming. I have a lot of painted figures for 15mm sci-fi and probably as many unpainted ones. I am just not sure that I could be bothered painting them all over again. Maybe if money were no object, I could get someone else to paint them all over again though. Of all the things I game, 15mm sci-fi is the most tempting to buy back into in this thought experiment. And there are a lot of different rules to play it with, so it could provide a huge amount of variety.

Advanced Squad Leader

ASL has been a part of my life for 30 years. I've done tournaments, played a lot against friends and played a lot solo. It's a game system that has so much to offer that it ought to be a no-brainer buying back into it. And yet, I sometimes think I should just sell up my ASL stuff. I rarely get to play it these days and all the players seem to be concentrated in places that I never work. The fact that I don't use it at the moment is the primary reason I would not buy back into it. Still, if I lost it all and had the means to buy back in, I probably would, assuming that the modules I want were available. Having it there would mean that I had the potential to play again. That seems important to me. I just have to hope that the carers in the nursing home will be willing to move the counters and tell me what is on them when I am in my dotage and finally have the time to play.

Interestingly, I have seen my focus change in recent years. I am more interested in playing on the historical maps and playing the Eastern Front campaigns. So, there is a good chance I would buy back into the game but at a reduced scale. That would mean buying:

• ASL Rules
• ASL Journal digital download
• Beyond Valor
• Red Factories
• Valor of the Guards
• Solitaire ASL
• ASL map bundle

That lot would give me about 50-60 geomorphic maps, a set of historical packs with campaigns and maps, and the facility to play a wide variety of Eastern Front solo campaigns. That is more than enough gaming potential for one lifetime. An alternative focus would see me adding the Axis Minors and Festung Budapest modules to that set, or heading west to 1940 with the UK and Commonwealth, French and Allied Minors so I could do France 1940 and Norway 1940. In terms of compactness though, the Eastern Front is simpler and you don't wind up with any excess counters.

Anything else?

I'm struggling to think of anything else that I would automatically buy back into. My gaming has always been steered a lot by what my opponents want to play when I have someone to play against. My philosophy is generally that it is better to play than not, and that means accommodating others. My poor, long-suffering opponent, Steve, has been drawn into more than a few fads by me and vice versa, but that is not always the case. So, if I were to start anything new, it would probably be inspired by contact with others, although there are a couple of rules/periods that I am more likely to choose to work on alone: Command Decision: Test of Battle with the Benghazi Handicap sourcebook for the Western Desert, and anything Viking-related spring rapidly to mind. I also quite like the idea of a Swedish-themed Seven Years War or Great Northern War imagi-nation so maybe I could use this imaginary opportunity to work on those.

The other driver for my gaming is games that can be played solo, preferably with a collaborative option so I have the option of playing with others. If they are compact and easy to take on my travels, so much the better. In my current circumstances, I think that largely precludes figure games, especially because I don't think I could be bothered painting the figures all over again. I seem to enjoy painting less and less as the years go by! So, that leaves me looking for solo and collaborative board wargames for the most part. There are a lot around these days, which means I could look around to see what takes my fancy and buy those.

And you?

If you have got this far in my ramblings, what would you buy into in this thought experiment?

A retrospective on 2021

 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.

Game	Qty
Gloomhaven	122
Beneath the Med: Regia Marina at Sea 1940-1943	11
Thunderbolt Apache Leader	11
RAF: The Battle of Britain 1940	9
Field Commander: Rommel	7
Heroes of Telemark: Commando Raids in Norway, 1942-43	6
BattleTech: Beginner Box	3
Vikings: Scourge of the North	3
Rangers of Shadow Deep	2
Fistful of Lead: Starfighters!	1
Five Parsecs From Home: Solo Adventure Wargaming	1
Space Empires: 4X	1
Terraforming Mars	1

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.