Now the year truly comes to a close. I’ve celebrated the sixth anniversary of this blog this year. I guess that means it’s time for this blog to grow up and go to school. Let’s see what has been...
Now the year truly comes to a close. I’ve celebrated the sixth anniversary of this blog this year. I guess that means it’s time for this blog to grow up and go to school. Let’s see what has been going on here this year – as the last Farewell 2023 post.
You can read the other posts here:
Farewell 2023 – New-to-Me Games
Farewell 2023 – Historical Fiction
Farewell 2023 – Non-Historical Games
Farewell 2023 – Historical Non-Fiction
Farewell 2023 – Historical Games
Overall, my blog views increased by around 20% compared to 2022. Nice to see I’m not just yelling into the void!
As per usual, around 40% of my readers come from the United States (that has been a pretty stable number over the last years). Around 20% come from other English-speaking countries.
The largest crowd from outside the Anglosphere is my native Germany (which almost doubled views compared to the last year), ahead of Spain with its strong historical gaming community.
Some other notable increases of views come from Poland (which is now in the top 10 countries of my readership) and Hungary (which almost tripled views compared to 2022, and now boasts more than much bigger countries as Brazil or Japan).
2022’s great success in Luxemburg was sadly not repeated – views from there decreased by almost 80%. I guess my fan from Luxemburg moved on with their life.
And now on to what I think represents the best I had to offer this year. As I’m very fond of this blog, allow me to present to you the double number of entries (six) as with the other categories in the Farewell posts. Also, as no one likes to select their favorite among their children, I will not crown a winner and rather present the posts in the sequence they were posted.
1848 series
The revolutions of 1848 were a truly European event. After the spark of revolution had set Paris ablaze, the fire of revolution spread – most importantly to Germany, Italy, and Hungary. Yet the forces of reaction where only temporarily paralysed, and when the trajectories of the various revolutionary movements diverged, the Empires struck back. While the revolutions are commonly thought to have failed, their long-term impact was immense – they established modern politics with parliaments, mass media, and political associations as the dominant form of how to run a community (and forced the erstwhile opponents of this system to play along with it and become better at it than their revolutionary adversaries). I must confess that I did not know all that much about the revolutions before this year, so doing the research for the blog posts was a real learning experience for me! I love it when blogging does that.
Soviets in Afghanistan miniseries
When I started this blog, a lot of my blog posts were about the Cold War – hardly surprising given that back then I was still doing my M.A. thesis on the Cold War in board games. I have branched out over the last years, but the Cold War is still one of my primary historical interests, and I like to revisit it on the blog every once in a while – as I did with the Soviets in Afghanistan miniseries (part 1 and 2). The Soviet imperial overstretch there was immensely important for the Cold War (it sealed the end of détente, and hastened the demise of the Soviet Union itself); but it is also very instructive for events much closer to our own time – especially the failure of the US-led coalition’s two-decade mission in Afghanistan, and the approach of Russia (as the Soviet Union’s largest successor state) to warfare.
A Tribute to Klaus Teuber
I first played Klaus Teuber’s Catan in the late 1990s. This was the game which really got me into board games in the 1990s – elevating them from one medium among many (and one which with I spent a lot less time than with, say, books or TV) to the one I have found most interesting since then, and with whom I have engaged on a much more active level – from writing about them to some little designs of my own. Reading of Teuber’s all-too-soon death in April this year prompted me to write a little eulogy about what his games meant to me – one of the more personal things you’ll find on this blog. I’m sure many of you have their own Klaus Teuber stories to tell – let me know in the comments (here or under the original article)!
My Favorite Card: Decolonization
I love how games can engage people with serious topics (from history or otherwise). Luckily, I am not alone in that: Many outlets cover these games online. One of the highest quality ones is the Conflicts of Interest zine edited by Harold Buchanan, Andrew Bucholtz, and Bobby Nunes. I have contributed two articles to the zine this year (both were also republished on this blog): One on my approach to writing engaging after-action reports, and one in their My Favorite Card series in which I detailed why the Decolonization card from Twilight Struggle (Ananda Gupta/Jason Matthews, GMT Games) is my favorite from any card-driven game. The short version: It’s historically interesting, it represents a very typical Twilight Struggle way of thinking about events on the ground, and there is also a little bit of a personal story behind it.
Weimar 1923 series
Another topic about which I learned much doing research for blog posts! Really, there is barely anything that sparks my interest in a historical topic as much as an intriguing board game about it. And Weimar (Matthias Cramer, Capstone Games/Skellig Games/Spielworxx) is nothing short of intriguing – I’d been waiting for its release for years. Of course, I jumped at the chance to play an advance copy, and found the game so historically deep that I ran a four-part series on the blog dealing with just one year of its events – the fateful year of 1923, when the nascent German democracy almost fell to economic woes and political turmoil, but braved the storms and ushered in an era of relative calm. No mean feat, and one that I think is worth reading about.
Transparency: I have received a (used) copy of the game from one of the publishers.
Hannibal (Cover Comparison, #1)
Images are important sources for historians. They convey meaning in a condensed, accessible, and intuitive manner, and thus they have been used for millennia for all kinds of educational, political, and commercial purposes. One possible use for images is the outside of board game boxes, on which the cover art is supposed to get onlookers excited about a game. I have compared the covers of two editions of a game – Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage (Mark Simonitch, Avalon Hill) and Hannibal & Hamilcar (Jaro Andruszkiewicz/Mark Simonitch, Phalanx) and looked at the ways in which they have done so. I might do more of these comparisons in the future – if you have ideas which games with several editions would make good candidates for this, let me know in the comments!
And thus concludes the year 2023 on this blog. I hope you had as much fun reading it as I had writing.
I wish you all an excellent year 2024, full of joy, health, and success!