Review of 2015

Another year has come and gone. Doesn't time fly when you're having fun?

This year has been dominated by Neil Thomas' book 'One Hour Wargames', which I got for Christmas in 2014 and which has provided me with many hours of interesting scenarios and rules tweaking. Machinas has also featured heavily, inspired in part by the wonderful 'Mad Max: Fury Road'. Once again my games have featured actions set in the South American Wars of Liberation, the ACW and the Great Northern War, but the ECW has also made  first appearance on this blog, and looks set to appear again. Club games have seen the usual mix of HOTT, WWII and Napoleonics, plus other odds and ends according to the whims of individual game organisers.

Once again my review of the year consists of selecting the most popular post, in terms of number of views, from each month, in order to generate a snapshot of what I've been up to.

January

The Missouri Incursion of 1864 - This was an attempt to use the One Hour Wargames scenarios to run an ACW mini-campaign, inspired by Price's Missouri raid of 1864. With hindsight the rules and army lists were flawed in a number of ways, but it was fun to play, and if we're not in this for fun what are we in it for?

February

One Hour Wargames - Scenario 1 - Pitched Battle (1) - I task I set myself for the year was to document each and every scenario in One Hour Wargames, in order. So, whilst I have played all of them at some stage I have been running through 'official' reports as well. This post is the first of the scenario reports.

March

There Goes The Neighbourhood - For years I have been using Lego to make buildings for my giant monster games. This year I finally put together a metropolis of paper buildings which look far nicer.

April

Make Your Own Mauriceburg - More paper buildings! I actually made these in 2014, and they have done sterling service since, but in this post I provided links to files which allow you - yes, YOU - to download, print and assemble your own.

May

Waterloo - The Action Around La Haye Sainte - Yes, even I got sucked into the whole Waterloo 200 thing. This was a great Black Powder game we played and I think that the title says it all. I have a feeling I was high on cold medication when I wrote the report.

June

W1815 - More Waterloo! W1815 is a truly excellent little boardgame which allows you to fight he whole battle in 15 minutes of so, and even explore different strategies without straying too far from the original flow of events. Well worth checking out.

July

Nazis on Skaro - This blog was originally set up to be all about HOTT, something which it almost immediately failed to do. But HOTT still features heavily from time to time, and this post not only features HOTT but has Nazis and Daleks as well. Perfect!

August

The Great War - We tried out the new boardgame from the Command & Colors stable and really enjoyed it. Sadly we haven't had chance to play it since.

September

Maurice Marengo - Something of an experiment, this was an attempt to use straight, unadorned Maurice to play a game set slightly beyond its historical coverage. It worked surprisingly well, and looked gorgeous.

October

MOAB 2015 - The HOTT Tournament - Read about how I got far luckier than I deserve in my one HOTT tournament of the year.

November

Epic Multiplayer HOTT - Our club's largest ever game of HOTT proved popular in November.


December

The Battle of Birmingham - The year's final top post saw me back with One Hour Wargames, or at least one of my heavily modified versions of the rules, fighting a skirmish from the ECW set in my home city.

So that's 2015 done and dusted. At the moment I am struggling to find the time or enthusiasm for any of my gaming projects, but I know that it's just a matter of waiting for something to grab my attention and then away I go into 2016.