Summing up 2017

As Mrs T is a bit poorly and I'm creeping round the house trying to keep quiet to let her sleep I thought I'd have a look back at the wargames I played last year. In this review I have excluded board wargames, except for the games of "Raid!" I played, using figures. The exclusion of board games is a bit arbitrary and is partly because I haven't included all the board wargames I've played on the blog, but I have included map games, so make of that what you will.

The results of my survey are summarised in the table below:

I'm pleased to see that I averaged nearly a game a week, which is sort of my aim, over the year. Of course, not all games are equal, - DBA & OHW are both short game systems and usually result in several games being played in an evening or afternoon. And it is certainly an average. I've had too many weeks this year when no games have happened, for me, at all. Our periodic gatherings with our friend from the West Country and my attendance at COW really pushed the numbers up. Of course, this list excludes all the shows where I ran "Northampton 1460", so they'd make a difference if included.

So I played 15 different periods and used 21 different sets of rules. Of those my favourite author is me, with four sets on the list, followed by Neil Thomas with three. The category "one-off" is for single shot type games that have specific rules just for that game.

What did surprise me is how few games of "IYTT" I actually played. If I'd had to guess I'd have said at least a dozen before I got to COW, so the amount of play testing was much less than I thought. I'm also surprise at how little AMW I played, its position as my "go-to" ancients rules usurped by Basic Impetus, - which also includes a couple of medieval games as well. DBA slips in there so high as it was used for my Khmer/Burmese/Thai games. The other system with a surprisingly low count is PBI, which probably would be higher if I owned a more up to date copy. And no AK47 Republic at all. That's a real surprise.

Of the systems on there I'd say there's only two I'd not care to play again, - "Black Powder" and "Sharpe Practice". "Hail Caesar" will be the basis of a project in 2018, so it will get more plays regardless of how cold it leaves me feeling. Actually, I suspect that Basic Impetus will only keep its place in 2018 as I'll be doing a battle day re-fight with it.

It's a decent spread of subjects, although I suppose most would lump Ancient/Medieval/Dark Ages/Asian Medieval in together, and you might merge Cold War and Modern.

Apart from being a sort of year end/new year type of thing to do the list may well provide me a prompt for what to look at in 2018. There's quite a few rule systems and periods not on there that deserve to be. All I need to do is find the time, - and the first quarter of 2018 is going to be tight, due to commitments both social and work, that are already in the diary.

I'll just have to play twice as hard for the rest of the year, won't I?