2019 in Review

As usual, I take a look back at my gaming goings-on for the year.

Lazy Gamer's Guide
Early in the year I posted a series called the Lazy Gamer's Guide. The upshot is to decide what is important and focus on those aspects of the hobby. That way you won't get bogged down or distracted. For me, playing games is the important objective; I have far less interest in the modeling side of the hobby. The Guide delineates how I, as a lazy gamer, go about focusing on the games. I adopted a strategy that I call the Three S's - keep it small, simple, and short.

MicroBattle Gaming
In accordance with my lazy gamer principles, my gaming settled into a pattern, which I call microbattle. I have all the components I need stored in a pencil box.

Currently, I am playing microbattles with generic 3mm figures with terrain drawn on dry erase boards. The figures are generic and could stand in for troops from ancient days until the 19th century.

I also have microbattle air and sea sets.

With microbattling, I achieve the basic principles of the lazy gamer. I have small armies that can fill a multitude of roles. The rules are simple, easily fitting onto 1 side of a sheet of paper. Finally, game times (including set-up and break-down) are short - in the half hour range. Thus, microbattling has greatly simplified and streamlined my gaming.

The End of the Twelve Games of Christmas
For the previous 5 Christmas seasons, my wife and I embarked on a challenge called the Twelve Games of Christmas. We set about playing 12 games during our holiday time off. It didn't happen this year. My wife worked over the holidays (she only had Christmas off) so we've been watching TV in the evenings instead (far less taxing). I played a few scattered games but not anywhere near a full 12.

A Dubious New Record
2019 was my lowest output ever. The next lowest was 76 in 2016; in contrast my record high was 126 in 2014. I theorize that there are 2 primary reasons why my output is down:

1. I've settled into a groove (or maybe a rut?) - I tend to post more when I am experimenting (different rules, new figures, etc.). As I settle into the microbattle standard I find that I am experimenting less. Thus, I have less about which to write.
2. LARP - I spent a lot of free time on LARPing this year. In April - July I was running a full immersion LARP for a few friends. Like a D&D campaign, it involved a lot of preparations. After that fizzled out I wrote rules for another LARP - this time a Christian-themed boffer-oriented LARP. This also took up quite a bit of free time.

My 2019 output is nothing to sneeze about, still averaging to over 1 post a week, but the trend is a tad disconcerting. I have a project for the new year; let's see if that helps.

Prognostication Review
I always begin with new year with a series of prognostications about my gaming expectations. Let's see how things went in 2019 (click here to see my 2019 predictions).

1. Box Sets - I predicted that I would organize my box sets. As I described above, my microbattle sets provide me 4 box sets (air, land, sea, space)
2. 6mm roleplaying - I stated that I wanted to get some figures for role-playing purposes. I did (choosing 10mm instead of 6mm though). Ironically, I haven't really played many games since getting the figures.

1. GADD - as always I've been jumping around a lot
2. Twelve Games of Christmas - this one's not coming true (as discussed above)