The 2009 Review

Thanks almost entirely to the existence of Fortress:Ameritrash and my ongoing need to fill column inches therein, 2009 has been the first year of my entire life during which I've played enough of the new releases for the year to actually do an annual review. It is unfortunate therefore that in terms of new releases 2009 has been a pretty poor year all round. Indeed if it wasn't for the last three months it'd be pretty much a write off. Maybe it was the hangover of so many great releases at the end of 2008, or perhaps a combination of GW's and Martin Wallace's lawyers scared everyone into submission, or maybe we have finally reached "The Ceiling" but whatever the reason I've found it hard to get immensely excited about any more than a tiny handful of games this year. Which makes writing this piece all the easier.

This isn't going to be some sort of awards show. Well, maybe it is, just a tiny bit but that's not my intention. I just wanted to have a real look at why quality releases seem to be so thin on the ground recently and to shine a deserved spotlight on those titles which have bucked the trend. It seems to me - or perhaps I'm just arranging things this way in my head - that things have been quite different this year across the three major genres of boardgames. So that's how I'm going to break this down.

We'll start by looking at Eurogames. It has to be said from the off that if the best a genre can offer for an entire years' worth of publishing are an efficiency engine game rendered "innovative" by being stripped down and copying CCG's, and a half-hearted Agricola clone about shipping then that genre is stuck in something of a rut. I think this is a great shame because it wasn't so long ago that Euros were really showing signs of moving away from worker-placement worship and churning out some very interesting, clever and often highly interactive games. It is with some regret then that I have to announce that my favourite Euro of the year is the relatively obscure Finca, a game about fruit farming in Mallorca. It has most of what I usually look for in a Euro: it's very simple to learn, very fast to play, a dose of random and multiple paths to victory. It doesn't have a lot of player interaction but it does have a rondel which, whatever MB says, I still think is one of the more interesting mechanics to emerge from the Eurogame stable in recent years. It's pretty much a throwback to the early German games we learned to love: quick, lighthearted and lots of fun. It'd make an excellent family game and adults can enjoy virtually endless jokes about the "big ass" token that each player possesses. In truth I haven't played any of the big-name releases from Essen yet, games like Stronghold and Dungeon Lords and in honesty they look more like the sort of forward thinking games I'd been hoping to see. It could be that the genre has turned a corner with the end of year releases.

Having rained on the Euro-parade of 2009 it's with some sadness that I have to admit that when you look at the releases of our own beloved Ameritrash for the same year, they're not a lot better. We see a similar pattern of a small number of big-name releases toward the end of the year and that's about it. As usual FFG stole the lion's share of the limelight with Middle Earth Quest and Chaos in the Old World but of course we have to mention all the deserved fanfare around the GW re-release of Space Hulk. And sad to say that's about it for the big boys: the only other game I've seen this year which could conceivably fit in this category is Luna Llena. It's actually worse than it first appears because one of those games is a re-release and two of the others are closer to hybrids than anything else, leaving Middle Earth Quest as the only bona-fide success in this category this year. On the horizon there's some glimmers of hope for 2010 with Runewars and at least two other big releases from FFG. But much as I like FFG's product, I do think it's a shame that none of the other small publishers in this arena really built on the promise of the preceding year and stepped up their game this year into something good enough to share the limelight with Christian Petersen and his games.

However, it's not all doom and gloom: there is one group of games which I think has bucked the trend for tired re-hashes of old ground and I really think it deserves closer scrutiny: wargames. No, there hasn't been anything as ground-breaking as Bonaparte at Marengo but most of the best new releases I've seen this year belong in this category. In terms of re-publishing it's hard to fault the latest edition of Successors for anything more than the usual wargame culprits of being a bit over long and complex, and it ups the stakes in production quality something chronic. If you want the best expansion I was totally bowled over by the Memoir '44 Campaigns book which took a very lightweight game and turned it into a long-term game system with fascinating depth. If you want innovation take a look at The Hell of Stalingrad which looks to be a fantastic base on which to build a great game series. Conflict of Heroes continued its march across Euro-land, sweeping all before it. And the crowning glory has been Richard III which pretty much redefines what we've come to expect from an approachable wargame in terms of finding the perfect balance of history, playability, dice and depth. I've even enjoyed some of the more traditional hex-and-counter material this year in particular Bastogne: Screaming Eagles Under Siege, part of the IGS series: it's a relatively simple game, not too much to remember and it's very tense to play. It helps a lot that I can't help visualising Band of Brothers every time I play it.

Does this tell us anything about why it is that 2009 seems to have been a relatively poor game? I think it does. It's curious that wargames are the one area where there does seem to have been some really exciting new releases and I think the reason has to do with market saturation. Eurogamers have a bellyfull of new releases every year. Ameritrash gamers have less but that's no big deal: the games are generally more expensive, have better replayability and take longer to play so we don't have such a need for a constant diet of new games. Both groups, with the exception of a few die-hards, tend to sample liberally from each other's games and hype aside the cream tends to rise to the top over the longer term. Wargames also have hit market saturation but the big difference is that the market is smaller and that there's a lot less crossover. Wargame designers and publishers seem to have cottoned on to this fact and are producing more and more games which seem expressly suited to reaching out into that crossover market and grabbing a share of the action. That's the driver toward more innovative, more interesting, more accessible games which doesn't exist to anywhere near the same extent in the more popular areas of hobby gaming. Without an external driver we're left with nothing other than the personal aspirations of designers to act as a creative force. That's not all bad: it keeps commercialism out of the equation and is almost always going to be sufficient to keep the games market ticking over. But without any external pressure well, let's just say it's a pretty slow tick.