Saturday, May 1, 2010

Helloo (helloo, helloo, helloo...)

OK, it's been rather quiet in here for some time now, so I thought it was about time to post something to show we're still around.

We're currently in the middle of our long-planned OCS Korea game, with me as the godless commies, and Eric as the capitalist pig-dogs. We've got as far as November 1950, so we're not far off half way through the game. We had planned to post thoughts as the game progresses, but, as you've probably noticed, that hasn't happened so far. The game-end post should have something to say. And then some.

I was looking back through some old posts for info on a particular game we'd played, and found a plan from last year of what we wanted to do. In the absence of anything real to post, I thought I'd give it a quick revisit. (Hey, content is content, right?)

This is what I posted almost a year ago that we were going to focus on, and [how it panned out]:

  • OCS - completing Sicily, and perhaps Korea [Tick, definitely.]
  • SCS - TME again, and more from this series, which I'm very fond of [Mostly a tick, we played Bastogne and Guadalajara, but never did get back to TME. Yet.]
  • Bitter End - with the revised retreat rule, this is a high priority [Fail. Still one I'd like to retry.]
  • Conflict of Heroes - getting deeper into the scenarios, including tanks [Tick. Now for Storms of Steel!]
  • CDGs - Shifting Sands, PoG, PuG, and more (oh, my!) [Fail. Although I did play PoG and PuG with another gaming partner, so I get a tick. Nyah!]
  • Musket & Pike - OK, we haven't played this here, but we've played a few scenarios before TSttC [Tick. Although our grand plan of playing all the scenarios in the box gets a fail.]

So, about 3.5 ticks out of a possible 6. Not a bad score really, considering all the great games out there, and more arriving all the time. If anything, we've found another couple of games to add to the list of games that we'd like to get back to the table again:

  • The Caucasus Campaign [we actually played this before the holidays, but never managed to get the posts done]
  • Richard III [As this is only ~3 hours, it's quite likely to see table time in our upcoming retreat.]
  • Red Star Rising [This would be another multi-session event, but needs serious table space.]
  • SCS The Mighty Endeavor [I need to try the Allies, to see if I can do better.]

So, what's my current take on the path ahead? Mostly it's pretty much the same.

  • OCS Korea - We've got some time to go on this, and with the upcoming retreat we're not going to get another session until the end of May. At ~3 turns/session, we're looking at another 5-6 months to complete this, although we might be able to fit in some full-day sessions to speed things along.
  • SCS - There are lots of games in the series that I'd like to try. With limitations on space, these may see a lot of table time after Korea is finished, as they're mostly single-mappers.
  • Bitter End - I still want to give this another go, the whole campaign with the updated retreat rule.
  • Red Star Rising - I want to try running the Axis, to see if I can do any better. As this needs a large table space, this is the most likely not to happen.
  • Conflict of Heroes - Storms of Steel

In amongst all those there's quite likely to be a few single session fillers. And then there's all the stuff that's in the current production pipeline. Man, I so don't want to think about all that.... :)