My Gaming Year 2023

Another year ended, another end of the year report. The first thing that comes to mind is that I didn’t blog as much as I would have liked, but this is about my gaming year, not my blogging year. So what have I played? Let’s have a look at the Boardgamegeek statistic.

Top of the list is Traveller with 21 plays. The remote RPG group has become a real mainstay of my gaming. We meet pretty regularly, which means that we could finish the sci-fi campaign this year. We did a number of one-shots with other systems and will now start a new campaign, with Martin as GM running Call of Cthulhu. I’ve already made a character – a rare books dealer – and I’m very much looking forward to it! There was also a bit of face-to-face role-playing, most memorably Cthulhu Dark and Fiasco. I definitely want to try out more story-telling games in the vein of those two in 2024.

Summer event 2023 – an outdoor game of What a Cowboy!

Miniature wargaming wise, this was definitely the year of What A Cowboy. The rules were released in April and I played my first game at the beginning of March. From then on, I played a number of single games with different people as well as two campaigns remotely with Stephan in Sweden and Martin. WaC was also the game of choice for our yearly summer event, which was one of the highlights of 2023. This time, we not only had guests from France (Manu brought this nephews), but also a spontaneous appearance by my nephew, which made me especially happy as I haven’t played with him for ages. The only downer was that Christoph was missing this year… hopefully, he will be back in 2024!

The battle at the Head of Passes.

Among the top three on the BGG list, you will also spot a game with the unattractive name Unpublished Prototype. This is the BGG placeholder for games that are not yet published and therefore not in the database. In my case, it refers to my American Civil War naval rules. I’ve been thinking about those for a couple of years now and in summer, I suddenly got the urge to finally wrap them up. I did a lot of playtesting, but also printed, modeled and painted numerous ships. By October, the game felt like it was finally finished – feedback from different players was pretty good, I had most of the rules text and was playing around with the layout. Then, I was hit by a wave of self-doubt and began to dismantle everything I’ve designed and written so far, with the idea of starting anew from scratch. Fortunately, I realised what was happening and pulled the emergency brake in time. With the plan to take a step back and have a short break from the design process, I decided to occupy myself with something else for a time.

Somewhere in the East Indies…

Along came Mad for War. I’ve been following Barry Hilton’s progress via Facebook for a while and always found it very inspiring, so I decided to take the plunge. The rulebooks really is gorgeous and the rules are fun. I painted a couple of 1/2400 ships from Tumbling Dice, which are lovely, and started to read about the period. I got especially interested in the early colonial actions involving ships from the Dutch East Indies Company in the early part of the 17th century. I also tinkered with David Manley’s Far Distant Ships, a great set of rules which I have adapted to the early 17th century by completely changing the command and control mechanics. Then I had the idea that a campaign with combined land operations would be fun, as I remembered my mate Sigur’s huge collection of 10mm 30 Years War figures – couldn’t they be used for the European troops? We played a test game of Irregular Wars, a set of rules specifically designed for small colonial battles in the 16th and 17th centuries, and I liked to so much that I placed an order with Pendraken for 10mm Indians to represent the small Sultanates of the various East Indian islands.

Trying out Irregular Wars.

I also played a number of other miniatures wargames. Christoph ran 7TV Fantasy, which has some really interesting mechanics.

7TV.

I did get in a couple of games of Sharp Practice at the beginning of the year, with the large birthday game covering the skirmish at Eferding in 1809 being another highlight of 2023. I also had a fun game of Song of Drums and Shakos with parts of Sigur’s splendid 28mm napoleonic collection (see his blog for an AAR) and also had another go at big battle napoleonics using my 6mm collection. This time, I tried Drums and Shakos Large Battle, but again it was not what I’m looking for.

Speaking of napoleonics, another of the year’s highlights was touring the battlefield of Wagram and visiting the local museum. This was not only a great day out, but also very insightful and something that I definitely want to do more often.

As always, I also played a rather eclectic range of boardgames. The highlights among them were Undaunted: North Africa, which I bought last year, and Gettysburg (125th Anniversary Edition), a very old game of which I finally found a well-priced second hand copy. It’s a hex and counter game, which I don’t normally like, but it has simple mechanics and a tidy look (no stacks!). Most important of all, it creates a dramatic narrative. In our game of the first day’s battle, with me playing the Union, Schurz’s division made a heroic stand defending the town of Gettysburg itself. If you know how much of a fan of the XI Corps and Schurz’s division specifically I am, you can imagine my delight!

Other noteable boardgames were Spirit Island, which is a favourite of my wife’s, revisiting Lords of Waterdeep, which is the most fun eurogame I know (and probably the only one I really like) and our perennial favourite Race for the Galaxy, for some inexcplicable reasons a game I win more often than not.

Oh, and a couple of days ago I had a game of Xenos Rampant, which rekindled my interest in sci-fi miniatures gaming. Maybe there will be more action for my 15mm sci-fi collection in 2024…

Xenos not yet rampant.

As always, I’m a bit surprised by the number of games I got in, especially considering that this year had a number of unpleasant events, including health issues and a (planned) hospital stay which knocked me out for a while. It is all the more gratifying to see the place gaming has in my life and I’m very grateful to all of my gaming partners for providing joy even if so-called real-life events sometimes make things difficult.

I don’t do plans, so there’s not much I can say about 2024. I’d like to keep up the gaming, as this is the most important thing about the hobby for me. Miniatures wise, I feel that I’m still not finished with naval stuff, so there’ll probably be more ships. After the Xenos Rampant game, I rummaged through my lead mountain and started to paint a couple of sci-fi vehicles. Hopefully, I’ll finish my ACW rules. A campaign combining 17th century naval and land actions would be cool. RPG wise, I’m lucky to have two thing to look forward to: Call of Cthulhu in our remote group and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which Christoph wants to run next year. For boardgames, I’ll let myself be surprised what’s coming up. And as always, I’d like to blog more…

I hope you also had a good year. I wish all of you a Happy New Year and the best for 2024. Happy gaming!

The Raft Lookout

Welcome to another installment of the Lookout, my overview of things that caught my eye.

First, a boardgame. The Hunt is a two-player wargame dealing with the WW2 operation leading to the Battle of the River Plate: the hunt for the German “pocket battleship” Graf Spee. The game’s production is currently crowdfunded on the platform gamefound, but the goal has already been reached, so it will be produced. The game looks very good and I’ve heard good things about a previous game by the same designer. I like that it is card driven and that the German player’s movement is hidden from the British player, which should provide for a dramatic cat-and-mouse game. It is also inexpensive, so I decided to back it. If you are also interested, there are still nine days left to back The Hunt: https://gamefound.com/projects/saltandpepper/the-hunt

Staying with the naval topic, Sam Mustafa has published a new set of naval miniature wargaming rules called Nimitz. They promise to deliver a quick and uncomplicated game of surface actions, but also include a campaign system that deals with planes, submarines, searching and similar, more complex stuff. As I think that, with naval wargames, a campaign context is much more important than with land wargames, I’m certainly intrigued by an integrated campaign system. I got the rules two weeks ago, but only had a very superficial look into them. The first impression was that they are a bit more granular than David Manley’s Find, Fix and Strike, which might make them more suitable for smaller actions. Although Sam Mustafa has provided ship lists for the most important fleets, there are none for the Spanish Civil War, so I’ll devise them myself. I’ll also paint up more of my Navwar WW2 ships – I went a bit on an ordering spree in December, as they are just so cheap, so I have a lot of them lying unpainted in a box…

Sellswords & Spellslingers is one of my favourites and also one of my most played games. However, although I have played a campaign or two, many of my recent games have been one-off affairs. Recently, Ganesha Games have published two campaigns for Sellswords: a short one, containing six scenarios, called Night of the Assassins, and a much more elaborate one, Close Quarter Battles. The latter is set in a city that sounds very much like Lankhmar, which is a welcome coincidence as I have recently been in the mood for some Fritz Leiber stories. It seems to have a narrative that offers more choice to the players than the usual linear campaigns that are the standard for those kind of games. I bought the book in the hope that I will be able to rope some of my mates into playing the campaign – between them, Sigur and Virago have enough fantasy buildings to recreate the City of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes with ease…

The Battle for Ringsend

For the last two months, I have been running a play-by-email game for four friends. It was a kind of Kriegsspiel insofar as the players had limited information, but the map and the rules were more akin to board games. After my last experiences with Kriegsspiel, I wanted to have better structured rules – I thought it would make it easier and quicker to write orders and to process those orders. This worked out only partially: As the rules were written a bit hastily, there were many loopholes and inconsistencies and I had to modify them along the way. I’m very grateful for the player’s patience!

My set-up.

The game was set in a fantasy world I called “Ringsend”, with four kingdoms vying for control: The Wood Elves, the Dwarves, the Orcs and the Humans. However, the humans really were undead – the human leader was a necromancer and I gave him some special abilities to integrate his enemy’s losses into his army. Well, it sounded like a good idea at the time. Unfortunately, I really didn’t think it through properly and it caused some frustration with the players (after one turn, another player took over). I also changed the special abilitiy several times to find a balanced mechanic.

The other special abilities were rather predictable: the Elves were quick, the Dwarves had advanced siege equipment and the Orcs couldn’t be too sure how many of their troops would turn up at a battle.

Players could also assemble heroes and give them tasks, such a retrieving an artefact or trying to assassinate an enemy leader.

The Battle of Ilsig

At the start of the game, the Elves and Dwarves quickly expanded while the Orcs and Humans took some time to get off their feet. Virago, the Elf player, was very methodical in his approach and managed to occupy the most locations. He also forged alliances with the Orcs and the Dwarves. Dwarves and Elves soon began a campaign against the Humans, while there was some skirmishing between Orcs and Humans. The campaign culminated in a big and chaotic battle at the town of Ilsig, which covered the entrance to the Necromancer’s fortress. The battle was a lot of fun for me as a game master, as the Orcs unexpecetly pitched in, but as they were not allied with the Dwarves, those suddenly began to fight against each other.

The Necromancer managed to get the help of a dragon, but had little chance against the combined might of Elves and Dwarves. He sent two assassination parties to the Elvish court, but neither of them succeeded. In the end, his fortress was overrun. His realm was destroyed, but, like any good villian, he himself escaped on the back of the dragon…

As the Elves and Dwarves quite liked their alliance and did not want to break the peace, we decided to end the game here.

This is the end score (numbers indicating locations occupied):

Elves: 12

Dwarves: 10

Orcs: 4

Humans/Necromancer: 0

The final positions.

The Dwarves had a number of well placed armies and a surprise strike against the Elves would have been interesing. But alas, the players prefer peace!

It was great fun running the game and I hope the players also enjoyed it, even if the rules were shaky and rather fluid sometimes. But the narrative turned out great, and at least for me, that’s the main thing.

I’m already planning another such game – this time in a sci-fi setting. Let’s see how it works!

Missin’ in Action 2019

After last year’s success, we had another gaming event with friends. This time, the weather was friendly and we could set up in the garden.

The main attraction was a game I had been working on for quite a while (not continously, though): namely a tavern brawl based on the old Brewhouse Bash rules from White Dwarf #223. I collected figures in brawling poses, which were harder to find than I thought, and built some terrain. The main headache proved to be the playing surface. After several aborted experiments I had to make a last-minute compromise and take a sheet of unpainted PVC floor coating. It looks ok, I guess.

Here are some impressions from the game:

 

Dispute at the bar.

Scuffle on the toilet.

The bouncer stands his ground.

The game was simple fun. We had eight player, but it still moved along at a good pace. Austrians of a certain age grew up with Bud Spencer & Terrence Hill movies and the game conveyed the feeling of those comic scuffles pretty well.

Afterwards, we played two parallel games of Sellswords & Spellslingers, which is aways a fun game, especially for events such as these.

Thanks to all the players, it was great to spend an afternoon and evening gaming with friends!