My gaming for the last 12 months (a ramble)

The continuing journey with my rules and gaming in general
Just an update on where I am with my ancients and WW2 gaming that has been light on (understatement) in the last year or two.

This is a post on its own – I rarely do posts that are not battle reports.  I was thinking of putting it before the next ancient’s battle report but it is a bit long for that so I have moved it into its own blog post.

Short version: 15mm ancients and 6mm WW2 battle report writeups (one each) nearly done.  Using my own rules  More gaming likely to follow as mojo is improved.

Background
It has been an interesting 12 months in the world of my gaming.  It has been sort of on pause while we renovated a house. I did a post last year for my priorities for the next few years that can be found at this blog page.  I have had a look and my priorities are still the same.

We moved into the new renovations early July but there is still stuff to do (there will always be stuff to do!).  I have had to put some gaming stuff in storage – mainly 20mm WW2 terrain and a lot of boardgames.  The latter I could not get rid of (even though I do not play them) mostly I keep on the assumption I will get around to playing them in retirement. It is dawning on me that my tastes have changed over the last 20 years and maybe I will never play them. Luckily I will be able to defer that decision for a while as the storage is free and the boardgames do not take up lot of space.

Gaming stuff
With me I still have:

• all my 20mm WW2 wargaming figures and vehicles and a little bit of terrain I used for some skirmish games
• all 6mm WW2 figures and terrain
• all 15mm ancients and terrain
• some spaceships
• some 15mm SF figures
• some 1/600 medieval ships
• some 20mm civilian figures (maybe for Pulp Alley)
• a few selected paper rules I do not have in PDF and a few selected boardgames that I may get around to playing.

Actually, quite a lot other than 20mm terrain and the majority of boardgames!  I have all these the figures as they are stored in two sets of drawers that are also nice pieces of furniture that my wife likes so they are keepers and also easily accessible in the lounge.  And I have the map drawers wherein I play 99% of my games anyway. Therefore I am not really constrained too much by what to play!  Other than my favourite – 20mm WW2 on a large table.  It can wait.

I did a post last year on what some priorities would be for gaming to help with my mojo.
One of them was to do some solo RPG. So, while no miniature gaming in the last year, I have still been gaming, sort of.  I have been slowly running through some RPG solo games using THW rules and a spreadsheet.

WW2
But on miniature gaming, my number one love is 20mm WW2 on a table tennis table but that is out for the next year or two. Last year I did a few portable 6mm WW2 games on a small 12x12 grid.  I planned to do some more during lunchtime but them my back got sore, then a foot problem came back, then my back got sore again.  Nothing dramatic but enough that I did not feel like sitting down and crouching over a game during lunch.  In the meantime I had read some battle reports using Buck Surdu’s Combat Patrol.  Completely card based.  I thought – hey I could do that with my rules.  I have not seen or played or bought Combat Patrol so what I did was work out all the different results for combat, melee, spotting, morale, artillery, activation and events.  They would mostly fit across 12 cards but all possible results would need 36.  I used a spreadsheet to create the cards.  I made a set of 72 (double the 36 simply to allow for more randomisation),  It was harder to do this than I thought.  Anyway I finally cut them all out but this was during the last of my back issue.

Ancients
My number two love is 15mm Ancients on small tables.  I have been replaying historical battles using my own rules – Ancient Battlelines Clash.  I slowed down in 2017 as I was not entirely happy with them.  During 2017 and 2018 I did tinker with them to produce a new version and played the Battle of White Tunis with them.  I thought they made me happy but in reality I was still unsatisfied.  I detoured into writing a number of different 6mm ancient rules for a 12x12 grid…then ended up adding a lot of ABC into the last set to make them more solo friendly.  So they were really a newer version of ABC with hopefully all the things I did not like fixed, but on a 12x12 grid.

So now I had two rules to test on a 12x12 grid.  Rather than play at lunchtime I could just play at home.  But that then defeated the purpose of the 12x12 grid – the whole idea was it was portable and here I am playing at home where I have access to everything!  It should have taken one second but took to days to realise the rules would work fine if I changed “move 1 grid square” to “move 4cm” and use my normal 2’x2’ boards for non-grid battles.   The ancient rules did need a couple of minor tweaks to do with ranges that had to be slightly adjusted to move from grids to free-form.

Games
So the excitement is I have actually played two games!

1. 6mm WW2 on roughly 2'x2' table using homegrown cards instead of die rolls but the rules are the same as last year's 12x12 grid rules
2. 6mm ancients on a 2'x2' table using the latest incarnation of my own Ancient Battlelines Clash rules

Blog reports are in draft as I write.

Rest
I have not forgotten the 12x12 grid 6mm WW2 and the 12x12 grid ancients and will need to find time to play them during work lunchtime.

I also aim to revisit my 20mm WW2 Skirmish rules and have ideas on how to improve their play on the 2’x2’ table.

I have also played two games of The Final Frontier using a spreadsheet. I have some draft posts on why and the game reports.  Handily, I have also written and am testing some spaceship rules for small battles that play on a 8x8 grid.   Handy in that The Final Frontier can throw up the occasional battle that I could play out using these rules.  It hasn’t yet though.  So spaceship gaming may be occurring in the future as well if I play them again.

I have some boardgames with me - the ones I thought I may play - but in reality I can see I will not get around to them for years at the earliest.  Miniature gaming is a priority at the moment.

Final word
My output on the playing side of miniature gaming has been very low of late but the writing of rules side has been high!  But hopefully the playing ratio will improve now I seem to have broken the seal.