Review of the Year 2010

Well, even though I’ve only been doing bi-weekly columns this year I seem to have hit the dead zone between Christmas and New Year once again, when all good gamers should be playing with their new toys against willing family members so I’m going to try and keep it short. This is also going to be a little more personal than usual, and contain extended passages of unjustified self-pity, so you should probably be thankful for brevity.

This year has not been a good year for me in gaming terms since I’ve had virtually no free time at all to even see my friends for a quick beer let alone pull out and play a game. Indeed it’s not been a great year in many terms. At the start of it I lost my job and then picked up a new one after a month of unemployment. At the time I felt lucky to have managed to find myself another job relatively quickly in the teeth of a recession but it went very badly and shortly before then end of this year I lost that job, too. By the time you read this I should, hopefully, be girding my loins to begin a new role, again after a mere few weeks without a wage. I’m a lot more hopeful - and a lot more confident - about this one. However, the root cause of all these problems is a rather more uplifting event - the premature birth of my second daughter, the early arrival of whom was to blame for setting things off on a bad track with my previous employer thanks to the need for several weeks of unpaid leave without notice. Her determination to go to sleep nowhere else other than on my shoulder coupled with her equal determination to wake up every half-hour through the early evening is to blame for my social and gaming woes - I quite literally haven't be able to go out anywhere, else my partner would have been stuck with a screaming, sleepless baby. We're going to try and use the space over the Christmas holidays to teach her some better habits, so fingers crossed. And of course I know full well from our previous experience that it’s around this time that difficult babies start to mature into delightful toddlers. Still, my original plan to resume weekly columns within six months is out the window - it’ll be bi-monthly for a while yet, I fear.

So it is that I’ve taken to solo gaming with a vengeance this year, and I’ve been doing it in all sorts of unlikely times and places, such as the boot of my car at lunchtime, just to get my gaming fix. I think every title I’ve managed to review this year has been solo-able out of necessity: although I made a point of always getting in a couple of multi-player sessions to ensure a balanced review, that was the only way I could rack up sufficient plays to write comprehensively about the games I’ve been offered to review. As a result of this I didn’t really think it was entirely fair this time round to do any of my traditional end-of-year pieces such as updating my top 25 games by play time or looking at my geekstats, or any sort of awards show, although a couple of games will get a mention later on as you’ll see. Because the other curious side effect that this inability to play games has had is that it’s made me extremely jaded about sampling new games. I already own quite a lot of games, many of which are extremely good games that demand repeat plays and, for various reasons, haven’t had them. My copy of War of the Ring for example, a game which can easily support 20+ plays has seen action precisely three times since I bought it, not to mention the fact that I own the expansion and have never even read the rules. I’ve got a collection that spans a variety of themes, mechanics and styles and as more and more games come out less and less of them are looking as though they do something different enough to displace something I already own. So when I have so little time to play, it seems stupid to continue buying new stock when there are excellent games in my collection that already demand more play time than I can give them. I’m still desperately keen to play games, just not new games. I’m not at all unhappy about this. It is after all precisely what I’ve been advocating people do more of ever since I started writing. And I’m not dissing new games as un-innovative particularly either, it’s just that once you’ve built up a collection you have more and more of the bases covered and new stuff is less appealing even if it actually does the job better than what's gone before.

So I’ve made a grand total of one board game order this year and most of what I bought were games I’d already played repeatedly PBEM and which I liked enough to want to buy. The one new game in there was Cyclades, which I’ve only played once since buying it but which does look interesting and unusual enough to warrant the purchase. I certainly don’t own any other games that marry a strong auction element with direct conflict. Of the games I’ve received as review copies there are only two which I probably would have purchased had I not been lucky enough to get them as freebies: Castle Ravenloft and Frontline: D-Day, both of which I thought were outstanding which, in turn, suggests I’m getting better at picking games that suit my tastes from pre-release information. So, three games I’d have bought, at best: if you really want me to offer you a top 3 for the year that would be it, although I’ve not played a slew of other big name releases. Catacombs, for example, looks pretty interesting but I’ve not had the opportunity to play the review copy that Sands of Time went to herculean efforts to get to me (including extracting it from where it was languishing in a sub-post office in Nova Scotia), something I was sufficiently embarrassed about to eventually pay them for my copy. I also have copies of Cadwallon (a game that curiously seems to have slipped under the radar here) and Labyrinth that should get reviewed in January. Runewars looks excellent and seems to be holding interest nearly a year after release, and although I’ve not played it I maintain that much of the fuss made about the Dungeonquest re-release was unfounded and that the game actually got a dose of medicine that it badly needed. Fantasy Flight did promise to send me both as review copies but, to my intense annoyance, they never followed up so I’ve not had the chance to check them out. I was particularly cross about Dungeonquest since it’s a particular favourite and I own an original copy and can’t really risk the cash on an unknown of the reprint being better. In spite of my personal sore point over those review copies I have to say that I don’t really understand the flak that FFG seem to have picked up this year. As far as I can see it’s all been because one highly anticipated release - Horus Heresy - was overworked and conveniently ignores the fact that all their other games this year have been fair-to-excellent.

Looking forward to next year, then, about the best I can hope for at this stage is that I’ll manage to get in some more gaming time. I haven’t been tracking the pre-release schedules so I don’t know what releases there are coming up that might be of interest in 2011. I'm a sucker for the Scotland Yard design lineage and Letters from Whitechapel looks like it might be the latest worthy title to slap some real world theme on top of the basic concept. Since I enjoyed Castle Ravenloft so much it'll be hard to resist Wrath of Ashardalon and the same goes for Alien Frontiers after the near universal paean of praise that game picked up. There’s also a couple of interesting looking wargames from MMP on P500 at the moment, Storm over Normandy and What Price Glory although as is the way with P500 neither may actually be out next year, plus Band of Brothers from Worthington games looks to have a lot of potential. But for the most part it’ll be a year of consolidating and exploiting what I already own. And you know what? I’m really looking forward to it.

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