My hobby year 2024 began with a new purchase; Bloody Big Battles.
I've only completed one solo play through of the Battle of Coulmiers so far...
... but I'm keen to do more. I've started rebasing my Irregular Miniatures strips and organising them to do Froeschwiller some time in the coming year. There's even a plan at the back of my mind to maybe do Waterloo eventually!
January also saw the start of a new campaign. Muddy River Blues is designed as a time-limited, play-by-email exploration of counter-guerilla operations in Mississippi during the American Civil War. The main rules in use are Sharp Practice but I did use a modified version of Arc of Fire to resolve one particularly small encounter between patrols in the overgrown bottom-country west of Badfinger...
Ron and Richard are the players in this one and it's been fascinating to watch their forces moving about the map with very limited intelligence about what's actually going on. I suspect both sides would benefit from getting their player character commanders back to base temporarily to pick up news of events. The campaign rather ground to a halt in the latter half of the year as I was busy with other projects (see later) and Richard was working away from his home. I must get back into the saddle on this one.
Spring saw a few games of The Pikeman's Lament. A few Thirty Years War games in 6mm scale were supplemented by another game in our very irregular series of 15mm Samurai actions set around the Siege of Hachigata. This is another project I need to move to a conclusion.
The first big project of the year was Crisis Point 2024. This event was disrupted by first one and then a second game-runner dropping out due to family commitments or illness. In the end we managed with two games and the event was a great success.
I wanted to run a large game of TacWWII but was determined not to get bogged down with a huge game for all attendees. Having Andy and Neil available to run a parallel game of Cold War Commander and effectively splitting my own game into two semi-independent, four-player games meant that the event was manageable and went off very well.
In June I took Harpers Ferry down to A Barnful of Lard in Bristol.
The terrain is now in storage so that may be the game's last outing for a while. With six sessions at Lardy Days and three or four playtest sessions it's difficult to argue that the ratio of preparation time to play time is reasonable. However, I enjoyed the process of researching and designing the game and building the terrain so any decent cost-benefit analysis needs to take that into account.
In August I arranged a first game of a Cold War adaptation of TacWWII with Richard and Phil. The Battle of Jijiga was an adaptation of a scenario from Battlezones by Mark Bevis. It was an Ethiopian clash with Somali rebels and featured a number of T-54s and buildings 3D-printed especially for the occasion.
I was pleased with how the rules worked though it's been pointed out that I was probably generous in giving the defending rebels the opportunity to evade incoming ATGWs. In my defence I was more keen on testing the rules mechanisms than in accurately simulating the command and control limitations of WSLF tank crews!
The second half of my 2024 was dominated by preparations for Steel Lard. Quite apart from the administrative burden of recruiting game-runners and then allocating players to their games, I found myself spending so much time getting my Siege of Puebla game designed and built that very little other gaming took place.
The self-imposed design constraints were such that I needed to build 16 square feet of city and four of French siege works. In addition I'd made up my mind to have buildings progressively replaced by ruined versions as the game continued so I ended up with a major construction effort even recycling some buildings from previous games.
On top of that I needed to design and test new night-fighting rules for Sharp Practice and to create player-character commanders whose personal objectives and psychological peculiarities mitigated the risk of a siege warfare scenario bogging down into a static firefight.
In the end, things worked out well but I did feel that Puebla had perhaps taken up too much of my focus. By the end it was beginning to feel like a bit of a chore to keep working on it.
It's fair to say that since I got past Steel Lard, my hobby time has been spent on a glorious mish-mash of unconnected painting and historical research. Perhaps the epitome of this was an mostly pointless diversion into 15mm Thirty Years War that can only result in some more figures going on eBay.
Rules-wise the year has been dominated by Sharp Practice with seven games, followed by TacWWII with four and The Pikeman's Lament with three. After that there were occasional outings of Bloody Big Battles, Flight Leader, Hordes of the Things, Arc of Fire, and What A Cowboy. The last of these should make its way into joint third place after I've run a game over the Christmas holiday period.
So that was 2024. I'm not displeased with how any of it went but I'd like to avoid getting so bogged down into all-consuming major projects in the coming year... of which more anon.
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