Thursday, 27 December 2018

2018 Scoreboard

In a year l did little, I at least did something, and while the middle of the year was a near total wargaming blank, the year opened and closed on a note of wargaming interest, activity and optimism. There were a lot of little achievements (noted on my Workbench page) but here I'll just revisit the headline interests I outlined back in January together with the usual tally of games played and a note on the readership of this little blog.

The Men Who Would Be Kings

I didn't get into the Boshin War but I did accumulate Pathans and Egyptians and reinforced my Zulu War armies.

Rommel

Rommel has been put on ice indefinitely owing to lack of local enthusiasm. Life is too short to flog dead horses.

Chain of Command

I remain interested in Chain of Command but never got round to it and probably won't pursue it in the near future unless another local gamer emerges to champion it.

Thirty Ýears War

This came a little closer with the publication of Twilight of Divine Right, and I've been giving it some thought.

Games played

This has been the year of Rampant/Dan Mersey games which accounted for no less than 7 of the 10 games played:

Dragon Rampant 2
Dux Bellorum 1
Lion Rampant 1
The Men Who Would Be Kings 2
Pikeman’s Lament 1

The other games were:

Art de la Guerre 1
Command & Colours Great War 1
Corvus 1

Blogging

Lastly, this blog's audience has maintained an overall upward trend despite the five month gap in publication.



That's enough looking back. I'm now looking forward to outlining my 2019 interests which I'll do in my first post in the New Year.
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2 comments:

  1. Norm27 December 2018 at 06:16

    All good, the lack of enthusiasm for Rommel might make one wonder whether grids are the issue, yet this year, the grid based To the Strongest and their ECW game, seem to have been catapulted to stardom. The 3mm gamers seem to be the sector that have most embraced it, if blogs are any indicator.

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    1. doctorphalanx27 December 2018 at 09:58

      Hi Norm

      Interesting point. This is my take...

      There is certainly resistance to grids and ridicule of 2mm/3mm 'figures', but both can work well, can be made to look good and have their place.

      I don't know how well Rommel is doing in general, but I suspect there may be some specific problems with it.

      Firstly, it might have appealed more to enthusiasts of Grand Tactics if it had followed Megablitz in having battalion rather than company units. Company units seem to represent a lot of unnecessary fuss for a game that is not tactical, and place quite a low ceiling on the size of battles.

      Secondly, it has some odd conventions like turning the bases.

      Thirdly, and this is probably the most important issue, it abstracts aspects that might have been represented more literally. This takes power away from players and sits awkwardly with moving the lumps of lead.

      I thought Rommel had great potential, but it failed to convince or entrance my opponent and it certainly wasn't gripping in a way which the best games are.

      Rommel didn't turn out to be quite the game I was expecting, and I'm sure there is a gap in the market for a hexed version of Megablitz fully developed and supported with a range of historical scenarios. Unfortunately the market is probably too small for anyone to serve it.

      Richard

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