Games review of the year

As the club will not meet again till the new year, I'll offer up a note of the games I've played this year.  Overall, I've a note of 37 evenings at the club out of a possible 50, though I may have forgot to note what we played on a couple of evenings.  And so, by theme -

Ancients.
A good year with 6 games of ADG with 15mm figures, 1 game of Commands and Colors with 10mm figures on 4inch hex terrain, 1 game of Impetus with 6mm figures and 1 game of the Kallistra rules on hex terrain again.  

CnC is always good, but this year has seen the chaps at the club get to grips with ADG and play at lot more games.  It's proving popular with us and I've no doubt we'll see many more games next year.

Horse and Musket era. 

Managed 3 games of Maurice, 1 game of Napoleon's Battles 4th edition and 2 games of Commands and Colors Napoleonics.  The CnC games were played in June to mark the anniversary of Waterloo and saw 4 of us play two games side-by-side.  Great fun, with honours going to the French players.

My only problem with Maurice this year was I only managed to play 3 games. I'd been planning to try to play every month or 6 weeks.  Next year I'll be trying to get play more Maurice and hopefully I'll be helped by having my Great Northern War armies finished and my Seven Years War stuff painted or part painted (they've been undercoated for a while now).

Sails of Glory and Wings of Glory 

I'll give these two their own group.  We usually play these as multi-player games with each person having one ship of plane.  The games are always great fun, though I now think we may have been getting sailing into the wind slightly wrong. We'll have to re-read the rules bit on that. We usually get in one game of Sails in an evening, but 2 or 3 games of Wings.

One of my games of the year is definitely the Wings game we had where two of us had fighters against the Gotha bomber. The Gotha is big, sturdy and capable of throwing out some defensive fire.  Hopefully we'll play this again soon.    

20c 

I have a notes of playing 2 games of Flames of War though I may have miscounted.  And the Fast Action Bulge boardgame.  Good games, though I usually find Flames too low level for my taste. 

Dystopian Wars  

I played 6 games of Dystopian Wars this year.  Generally good games, though my initial interest in Dystopian has definitely waned.  The games just take too long and we've been finding we only get through 3 or maybe 4 turns in an evening if we're lucky.  The second edition rulebook is difficult to read and at times seems a glorified mess.  I like the concept of Dystopian Wars but each squadron takes so long to play.  I may well sell off a large part of my FSA fleet next year. 

Boardgames   

So many games to mention. I think I played 6 or 7 evenings of boardgames at the club over 2015. 

The year started with the really disappointing Legion d'Honneur; a bore-fest that was essentially a solo game for 6 players.  And worse than playing the game once, was getting persuaded into playing it again. 

Some of the usual suspects were played again - the old multiplayer favourites that are just great fun.  Among them are Mexica, Boomtown, Roborally, Metro, Pompei, Family Business and Sherlock. There are a couple of others which I can't recall the names of now; one is Ra (I think) and another is an exploration game similar to Mexica. 

The year ended with a good game; Blood Rage: Ragnarok.  That was a lot of fun. 

Games of the year.   

I may post more on this, but for now the two best miniatures games for me were ADG and Maurice.  Hopefully next year will see many more games of them. 

Sails and Wings were good and I'm certainly hoping we can play another Wings game against the Gotha. 

CnC is always fun. I've just sent away for the new Napoleonic module on Generals and Tacticians so I'm hoping to play some of that in the weeks ahead. 

Of the boardgames, Blood Rage was the best of the new games.  I hope to play it again.  I know the old favourites will be played many times.

Roll on next year.  I'll try to take more photos of club games so I can post what they actually look like.