Shaking Off Gaming Burn-out

It has been a number of months since my last post on all of my gaming blogs for a number of reasons. First, Cold Wars seemed to have scratched my gaming itch for quite a while. Second, I have been working on a new business model and so had to change my focus away from gaming and give my career skills a bit of a boost; I have been slacking for too long.

Since Cold Wars I can count the number of games I have played on one hand. Interestingly, most have been Borg (or Borg-like) designs. I have not even been gaming solo. Also, my painting and modeling can to a halt too.

Downsizing

My gaming buddy Don has been talking downsizing his miniatures collection and gaming effort. He mentioned dropping miniatures and sticking to board games (largely Borg designs), but I think he is just going to cut down his Flames of War collection. I doubt he is going to sell his new 25mm Ancients collection (or his old 15mm DBA one), or his 15mm Vietnam collection, but I am waiting to see if he sells the 28mm WW II collection, though. I am sure he is going to sell his various impulse buys like moderns, strange scales, and his excess Sherman's (do you really need 300 Shermans?).

For me, I am still debating selling off the 15mm AWI. I am still not satisfied with any set of rules I bought. To be honest, I bought them for two reasons: I like the uniforms, and that both sides' histories are written in English. To me the latter is a large selling point. If I sold the figures off, that would leave me with 15mm Flames of War, 28mm WW II skirmish, 15mm DBA Ancients, my old Warhammer 40K forces (which I will never sell), and all the wooden soldiers I can build.

AWI

The AWI rules that have worked out the best have been DBA or HOTT variants, but our one game of Black Powder was okay. If I use large enough hexes I could make a variant using Battles of Westeros (a Borg-inspired design) and use four bases per unit. But, if I do that I will just be perpetuating the problem and forcing me to keep the figures. :^) But, it might help re-energize me.

Flames of War

Now that I have sufficiently purged Flames of War version 2 from my memory it may be easier to make the transition to version 3. I am planning on running a game at home (to leave setup, if necessary) and trying to really get the rules down. I look forward to trying the Fearless Trained King Tigers from the Devil's Charge book. That might help re-energize me too.

I doubt that I will contemplate tournament play again though. Although I enjoy the WWPD podcasts, their content seems to be becoming very oriented towards min-maxing lists. It hasn't stopped me from listening though.


Well, enough babbling. Hopefully you will see something new from me soon, either a new AWI variant, some Age of Sail gaming, or a Flames of War report.