Review of 2021

As another year draws to a close it's time for my annual review post.

It's been a funny old year this year. It's the first full year that I've worked from home and that, along with some family issues mid-year, have been fairly disruptive to my routines. This has flowed through to my gaming, and has left me a little directionless and unenthused this year; there are things I'd like to have done, but I'm finding it much harder to initiate or focus on projects than I used to. That's not to say that I haven't played games; just not as many as in previous years, and I don't feel I've been as fun and creative as I normally like to think I am.

Anyway, I had a look through the year's posts, and I still seem to have run through a few sets of rules. The Portable Wargame - specifically my ECW version - has featured heavily, via a campaign and then, later in the year, some changes I made to the initiative system. I also got out Neil Thomas's 'Simplicity in Practice' and tried that again finding that, with a few tweaks, it's a fun and playable little game.

Nic Wright's offerings have featured heavily again - I have found either 'Blood, Sweat and Cheers', 'Palaeo Diet' or 'Galleys and Galleons' on my table a fair amount in the past 12 months. The latter has become a game like HOTT; something I can pull out and play with little preparation in order to simply scratch a gaming itch. The former has become the gladiator game of choice, and I say that as someone who has developed their own set of rules.

I rediscovered 'Black Powder' towards the end of the year, whilst new games have included 'A Billion Suns' and 'Giants', the latter being a reworking of 'Giant Monster Rampage'.

Boardgames have featured a fair bit as well. I rediscovered the delights of 'B17: Queen of the Skies', but the year has been dominated by a number of new games. First amongst these has been the wonderful cycling game 'Flamme Rouge', but we have also been entertained by 'Godzilla: Tokyo Clash' and 'Fast & Furious: Highway Heist'. 

Outside of gaming I have managed a little burlesque, mostly in the pre-lockdown early part of the year. And the biggest event of the year was the birth, in September, of my first grandchild.

Next year I have set myself what I suspect is an ambitious challenge; to play at least 52 different games or sets of rules. I did a rough count of how many different games I've played this year - it came out to around 37. So I have a lot of work to do next year.

Without further ado, here is my review of the year. As ever I have taken the post from each month which got the most views, with the accumulation of selected posts reflecting the year to some extent.

See you in 2022.

January

ECW Snakes and Ladders - Part 1 - My ECW Portable Wargame has seen a fair few outings this year. I started things off with a simple Snakes and Ladders campaign. Mechanically it was interesting to run; if I did it again I'd probably generate the battles differently. And I'm aware that the actual writeups could do with more colour and background.

February

Army Showcase - The Forces of Light - I did a couple of HOTT army showcases this year. This one features the forces from a couple of Alan Garner's fantasy books from the early 1960s. Along with its evil counterpart it's one of my favourite HOTT matched pairs.

March

Never Mind The Bullockornis - I haven't done a lot of painting this year; it has suffered from a lack of drive and enthusiasm along with my gaming. More so, since I dislike painting at the best of times. But I did manage to sit down and paint a load of new beasts for 'Palaeo Diet', expanding the variety of creatures my hunters can catch and eat, or be eaten by. In this game they were after a flock of flightless birds, whilst having to avoid giant monitor lizards.

April

A Billion Suns - First Game - A Billion Suns is a clever spaceship game from the author of Gaslands. After playing it a few times I'm not sure if that's all it is - clever. It is fun, but I found it hard to learn and teach since it requires the players to absorb a fair bit of information in order to understand how they are supposed to go about playing it; it's not just a simple game of lining up your spaceships and shooting each other. I would say that it's a miniatures game that owes a lot to Euro boardgames as much as it does traditional wargames. I might give it another look next year.

May

Gladiator Campaign - Part 3 - A gladiator campaign is always quick and easy to set up and run, and always gives an exciting narrative. This one used 'Blood, Sweat and Cheers' .

June

More ECW Portable Wargame Activation - One again the Portable Wargame features in my review. I love tinkering with the game, and came up with a way to determine unit activations that I felt improved the game. This is one of the posts in which I tested it. Six months on it's still a method I'm using, and seems to do the job.

July

Godzilla vs Kong - With Added Jaeger  - I got out my kaiju again, partially inspired by the King Kong vs Godzilla film. I had another go with the old 'Monster Island' game, but eventually settles on 'Giant Monster Rampage' instead. In the end I found, and bought, the latest version of the game, now called 'Giants'. I need to play around with it a little more, but it proved to be an interesting evolution of the system

August

HOTT Campaign - Season One - This is the third campaign I played this year to get into the list; a six army HOTT campaign using a simple mechanism to pair the armies based on their previous success. I ran it for four seasons in the end, each consisting of three battles. I felt a clear winner was emerging, but also felt that the selection of armies wasn't giving as interesting a set of games as I'd hoped. Still, the basic system worked.

September

A Family Announcement - As I noted above, this was the biggest event of the year! In September my son and his wife presented us with our first grandchild - Elijah MC Cooper Saunders (Eli). He's now nearly four months old, and has already played his first game of 'Black Powder' (or, at least, he assisted me in playing one, which is very much the same).

October

Turks vs Venetians- I dabbled in a fair bit of 'Galleys' & Galleons' this year, and my most popular post was this one in which two Lepanto-era galley forces thrashed it out. It was a big game by G&G standards, with about sixteen ships per side, but played quickly and smoothly.

November

Frocktober 2021 - Part 3 - Every year I do the Frocktober fundraiser for the Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation. This post covered the final batch of the eleven different dresses I wore throughout October. Our family raised nearly $1000.

December

A Portable ECW Encounter - And the year ended as it begun - with a Portable ECW Wargame. Once again I was testing changes to the game, and finally took the effort to write them up as well (that's in another post though).