Thursday, May 28, 2009

Update on current projects and the near future

I'm partway through writing about Mike and my adventures south of Rostov, but I've just started a new job and have had way less time than I expected in getting the post finished in a manner I like.

I just wanted to get something up here so you didn't think we'd completely disappeared on you.

Mike and I will spend likely the next two weeks finishing up our The Mighty Endeavor campaign. That's worth a post or two right there. Then I've got a surprise I'm springing on Mike. It's a well-regarded single-evening game I've never spoken about to him. We'll see if he likes it.

After that we're going to change things up a bit.

The original intent of the blog was to play games we could complete in an evening. We got into a cycle where we were learning new games nearly every week, and frankly we weren't giving them the attention they deserved. This was showing in the amount of mental energy we were spending during the games on just keeping the rules straight. This came at the expense of paying attention to what was actually going on and providing a coherent session report. Even the reviews portions of the (well at least my) posts were suffering due to this effect.

The other major issue is that, over time, both Mike and I have found our interests shifting to larger, more involved games.

Partly as a result of this, Mike has gotten things set up at his place so he can keep at least two games of decent size set up for weeks at a time. What we're going to start doing is play some bigger campaigns that will take many weeks to complete.

Our current plan is something like the following:
  • Tonight and next week: Finish The Mighty Endeavor
  • June 11: The Surprise
  • June 18 + a few weeks: Finish the Sicily Campaign we started last year. (I've got this game stored in an ingenious system I stole from an old issue of Operations - I'll write about that system some time in the future.
  • Next: Most likely the OCS Korea Campaign. This might be Burma, or it might be something completely different.

As progress on these games will be in small numbers of turns per evening, I intend to spend at least a portion of many posts explaining portions of OCS. These will cover the basics and will be geared for players who may have seen many of these games sitting near the top of the BoardGameGeek Wargames Top 100 list and wondered what all the buzz is about and why the games are so highly rated. I'm also likely to post off-cycle a few times as ideas hit me. As we've been quiet the last few weeks, I think this is a good time to institute a "post as the mood fits" rather than a sort-of-strictly-weekly schedule.

If there are specific features of OCS (or for that matter any game we've posted about in the past) you'd like to see me cover, please speak up. We'll be sure and cover them when able.

We're closing in on 2.5 years of Two Sides posts, and I thank you guys for sticking with us over time. This blog is a blast to write and every comment we get or link we discover keeps us fueled for more.

1 comment:

Tim said...

Thanks for the update - I'm really looking forward to your OCS posts, as I'm one of those guys who wonders what all the buzz is about.

I've dipped my toes into SCS (Bastogne, and Afrika II), and found them interesting, so I'm curious about OCS. I wonder, though, whether I've got the stamina and/or patience for the longer games - so hearing about it from you guys will certainly be of interest.

Enjoy the games!

Tim