On the 13th of September, 2024 I moved to South Korea.
Not permanently, at least I don’t intend for it to be, but for at least the next year this is where I live. My partner has a job at the local university, my daughter is in the kindergarten, and I’m doing stay at home dad stuff plus whatever freelance work comes my way (hey, if you’re looking for an editor or historian, get in touch).
This of course has quite a few implications for my future activities, but I will spare you all my lurching steps towards learning to cook with Korean ingredients and painful attempts to learn hangul. This is a website devoted primarily to history, and in particular to historical games and books. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to explain how I approached moving my hobbies to South Korea. The vast majority of my possessions are in a storage unit in Ireland – we brought only what we could fit in our (very heavy) checked bags, and about 80% of that was just clothes and basic necessities. That left very little room for games, books, or other fun things. I had to pack lightly and choose sparingly. I will be able to get some new games while I am here, but every new acquisition also includes the thorny problem of how I will bring it home with me (or whether I will). There were three primary categories I was considering when packing various hobby items: board games, books, and RPGs. Plus, one bonus group, but we’ll get to that later. The thought process behind what to pack for each type of item was often interlinked, but they each also have their own unique foibles as well.
Board Games
In terms of hobby gamers, I don’t have the largest collection. I try very hard to keep it (relatively) lean but it is a Sisyphean task. Even with that, my collection of games was far far too large to come with me to Korea, I needed to pick just a few. I also wasn’t sure if I would have anyone to play with, so games I was prepared to play solo were a priority. I quickly limited myself to just wargames – I prefer playing them solo to other hobby games, and I figured if I did find people to play with, it would be easier to find and buy a hobby game in Korea than it would an obscure historical wargame. So, with that in mind, I picked a handful of games, balancing old favorites with ones I was very keen to explore over multiple months.
The games that made the cut
(If you’re in South Korea, especially in or near Daejeon, get in touch. I would love to get some in person games played!)
Men of Iron: Arquebus – Men of Iron is one of my favorite systems ever, I particularly enjoy it solo, and I’ve only dabbled in the scenarios in Arquebus. I chose to only bring one volume from the MoI series, and this seemed like the best choice. I may also supplement this with playtesting some of the upcoming volumes that GMT has teased.
Sedgwick Attacks; A Greater Victory; Prelude to Vicksburg – Blind Swords is another favorite system of mine, and one that plays particularly well solo. Revolution Games kindly sent me these three games as review copies, and I figured that made it a no brainer to bring all three. They’re conveniently the folio editions, easy to squeeze in a suitcase.
Korea: The Forgotten War (OCS) – I previously covered how I’m planning to explore some games on the Korean War, so obviously I had to bring some with me. OCS is not a system that I have been desperate to learn, but it is the scale of Korean War game I’m interested in and I do like the emphasis on logistics. This one will be a challenge for my small Korean apartment for sure.
The Korean War – The seminal classic from Joe Balkoski, this seems to be thought of as the best game on the topic out right now so of course I had to try it. I managed to grab a mint condition copy of the old Victory Games edition and I’m very keen to explore it. Again, this is a big one, so space will be a challenge.
Give Us Victories – A confession – Sergio Schiavi very kindly sent me a folio edition of this game at least a year ago and I still haven’t played it. My excuse is that we plan on covering it on We Intend to Move on Your Works, and it has taken longer than I expected to get to Chancellorsville. I brought it with me both so we can eventually play it on the podcast and so I can explore the many interesting items in this package – seriously, I think there’s like four different games in here.
Army of the Heartland – Second confession, I didn’t really want to bring this one. This operational game on the western theater of the American Civil War is too big for my apartment and doesn’t even have the excuse of being about Korea. However, it’s the next game we’ll be playing for We Intend to Move on Your Works and I needed the rules for that, so I brought my folio edition. I doubt I’ll play the physical version, but who knows, maybe I’ll love it enough to try and make space for those two huge Rick Barber maps.
Books
Books are heavy, and I own so many. What to bring was a hard decision. There are a few, mostly secondhand, shops that sell English language books in Korea so I knew I could get some new reading material while I’m here. That meant that I mostly prioritized books that would be hard to find – ones on historical subjects that might not appeal to most English speakers living in Korea.
My hobby shelf in Korea - I’ll probably do my best to limit myself to about this much stuff. Space is limited!
I also managed to finish writing my second book before I left Ireland, so I didn’t have to bring much in the way of research materials. This spared me having to bring an entire suitcase full of books on the Hundred Years War, which was a real lifesaver in terms of packing. I will miss having so many books at my fingertips and will have to consider less book dependent writing projects for the next year, but nobody said this would be without sacrifices. The books that did make the cut were:
The Wilderness Campaign; The Legacy of the Civil War; Southern Lady, Yankee Spy – I’m keeping my theme of covering more American Civil War history and memory with these three books. One on a battle I’ve always liked but don’t know much about, an extended essay on the memory of the Civil War by one of the South’s best (and a personal favorite) writers, and a fascinating book on a Southern Unionist spy network in Richmond by an author I already really like.
Frederick Barbarossa – Have to bring at least one doorstopper to keep me busy. While it’s heavy, this will take me a while to finish, so the weight to time reading margin should be good. I also have this idea that Barbarossa’s Italian campaigns would be a great subject for an operational wargame…
Playing at the World 2e – The second edition of one of my favorite books, really looking forward to this.
And, of course, The Medieval Crossbow is my own book. I figured it might be nice to have a copy. Mostly just for personal comfort.
Roleplaying Games
Much like with board games, I have no idea if I’ll be able to find anyone to play RPGs with, so any games I brought had to at least be interesting to read as well as play. I opted to bring just two games with me, although they ended up being pretty heavy ones.
Dragonbane – I wanted a classic RPG experience but D&D with its three core books would have been far too heavy. Dragonbane, however, offers that classic adventuring party doing fantasy quest stuff in a compact, self-contained box with a lovely production. I really hope I can get another person or two together and actually play it.
Swords of the Serpentine – Gumshoe is one of my favorite systems, and it’s also probably my favorite system to play online because of how little dice rolling it requires. This is also a big ol’ book and one that I think will be really interesting just to read. Keen to see how Gumshoe has developed as a system in its latest entry.
The Robot in the Room
I first started building Gunpla as a Gundam Wing obsessed teenager in the mid-00s. That hobby went fallow when I traveled to Ireland for university, but I rediscovered it on a trip to Japan in 2019 and especially over the pandemic. Wargaming has mostly supplanted my Gunpla time (seriously, I have like two boxes of unbuilt kits I put into storage, all pandemic purchases I never got to), but I figured Korea would be a great time to get back into it – especially as I can easily find kits here. I brought two smaller kits with me to get me started.
I also brought some fiction books (we ended up bringing the complete novels of Jane Austen and Dashiell Hammett, two great writers but not what I’d initially imagined we’d bring) and a few other odds and ends like a small dice tower, some RPG graph paper, notebooks, etc.
That should give you some idea of what to expect from me for the coming months. There will still be some reviews of other games – I have a few reviews I wrote before traveling but still need to be edited and published, as well as games I played online and I’m hoping to receive a few other games from publishers as well – but expect coverage of some or all of the above to dominate much of what I publish here for the next while. I’m also hoping to take this opportunity to dig deeply into these games and other hobbies, possibly writing multiple pieces on some of these games. First, though, I really need to work on my cooking, the family’s gotta eat.
If you could only bring a handful of games and books to keep you entertained for a year, what would you bring?
Also, if you like what I do, maybe consider throwing me a donation on Ko-Fi. I would really appreciate it!