Merry Christmas to the Blogosphere

A short message to wish you a many Merry Christmas, peace, health and money (of course to be  spent in games, lead and plastic).

Looking back the year, gaming wise it's been a strange one with lack of focus on periods/rules and volatile activity due to the flooding of our club premises just before the summer, that put us out of business for many months (until November).

Notably also in my gaming group, we have had some dispersion of projects. After 2 years of intense Chain of Command games, we were eagerly expecting the release of the Sharp Practice II, the skirmish rules for the Black Powder era. After a strong start playing mostly focused on the Napoleonic era, we realised that skirmishing was not totally to our taste and looked for ways to scale it up.

The truth is that after several failed attempts, we decided to abandon the project and instead explore other rule options with the scale we were looking for. A strong candidate emerged with Age of Eagles II, ony to be put on hold after the release of Pickett's Charge in November.

Although the latter is focused on the ACW period, the author already announced a sister book covering the Napoleonic period. A few test games unveiled a very solid and interesting set of rules and we are now waiting for the new book.

Almost concluding the year, my attention is being called by Rattenkrieg!, a new set of skirmish rules for the IIWW period published by Barrage Miniatures. I played a first game last week and was very positively impressed by the original game mechanism, based on an action/reaction engine. I promise to write a detailed comment sometime next week.

But not all was negative. Less time wargaming meant more time allocated to painting and I'm myself surprised by the large output achieved of French Napoleonics in 28mm, becoming the French reference player within my gaming group. And more reinforcements are coming as a result of my participation in The Painting Challenge for the second year in a row.

Summarising, a peculiar gaming year 2016 and looking into 2017 to be a Napoleonic year.
Enjoy the holidays!