COIN

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2023 in Review and My Top 8 Games of the Year*

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2023 in Review and My Top 8 Games of the Year*

I’ve now been running this blog for two whole years, but somehow it feels a lot longer. I’ve been very pleased with how it has grown over the past year and I’m hoping to continue that growth going into 2024. I received several review copies of games this year which was really gratifying and allowed me to cover games that would otherwise have probably been beyond my budget - wargame blogging is not particularly lucrative. To mark the end of the year I want to reflect a bit on how I feel the last two years have gone and then, of course, provide my top ten games of the year. As per last year’s list, these will be games that I played for the first time in 2023 not necessarily games that were released in 2023 (although unlike last year this year’s list does is that were released during the year).

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Review - Andean Abyss by Volko Runke

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Review - Andean Abyss by Volko Runke

It happened! COIN came to the internet’s best online wargame platform, Rally the Troops, in the form of the series originator Andean Abyss. In many ways this is the obvious choice for Rally the Troops, it’s both a great place for those interested in learning the system and out of print with little promise of a reprint soon, so not in direct competition with sales. It also offered me the first time to try and dive deep into a COIN game and see how I feel about the system after repeated plays. The requirement to get four players and dedicate most of a day has made consistent plays of COIN games a challenge. I have dabbled with solitaire play, and enjoyed that, but I’m terrible at flow-charts and multi-hand solitaire is a very different kind of experience. So, I’ve been logging many, but not an insane number, of Andean Abyss plays over the past month or so, what have I learned?

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First Impressions: Gandhi by Bruce Mansfield

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First Impressions: Gandhi by Bruce Mansfield

I’ve enjoyed every entry in the COIN series that I have played so far. However, I also know that there is no way I could ever own every game in the series - my small European home cannot accommodate them let alone my hectic life. This means that I have spent an inordinate amount of time contemplating which entries in the series I would like to keep on my shelves, playing over and over again, and which I’m happy just experiencing once or twice via someone else’s copy. Pendragon is definitely staying on my shelf for the time being - it’s so different from the rest of the series and I’m a big fan of its late antique/early medieval setting. However, after much debate I decided to trade Andean Abyss away. I enjoyed it and it was very useful for helping me learn (and teach) the system, but my friends didn’t seem to like it as much as I did and playing A Distant Plain made me realise I wanted something a little different. However, I didn’t want to buy my own copy of A Distant Plain because its subject is a little too grim for me to want to play it more than a few times, no matter how much I liked the gameplay. After much internal debate, I decided to pick up Gandhi as my next COIN game. Gandhi’s new non-violent factions and other deviations from the core COIN formula intrigued me but if I’m honest the main appeal of Gandhi lay in two aspects: it isn’t really about war and the short scenario is supposed to be quite good.

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First Impressions: A Distant Plain by Volko Ruhnke and Brian Train

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First Impressions: A Distant Plain by Volko Ruhnke and Brian Train

Before playing my latest COIN game I didn’t have to learn how to play it because someone else had to teach it to me instead! At the end of May I had the opportunity attend Chimera Con in Dublin. Chimera Con is a one-day convention dedicated to playing games with other people who relish the opportunity of spending all day playing the one epic game. The organisers seek out volunteers in advance of the event to bring a game that they are prepared to teach to a table of potentially new players, and then players are allocated to those games for the day. I got a space playing A Distant Plain, Volko Runke and Brian Train’s COIN game about the Afghanistan War, covering the period of the war from 2001 to 2013. This would be my first time playing the game, but my third COIN game overall so I was reasonably confident I could pick it up pretty quickly. When I had played Andean Abyss at the start of May, I had been the government player, so this time I requested an insurgent faction and was given the role of the Taliban. The game organiser was the Warlords and the other players, both totally new to the system, were the Coalition and the Afghanistan Government. In the end the game took us about 7 hours, and I had an absolute blast playing it. I also have a few thoughts about it which I hope you will indulge me by reading!

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First Impressions: Andean Abyss

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First Impressions: Andean Abyss

I managed to get Andean Abyss to the table less than a week after learning it, which must be a record for me – it definitely beats the years I owned Here I Stand before I finally played it. I bought it largely because while Pendragon has been fascinating to learn, there’s no way I can teach that game to four people who have never played a COIN game before. It took me days to learn it – and I’m still not even sure I totally get it! The internet wisdom around learning COIN is to start with Cuba Libre, but for whatever reason the Cuban revolution doesn’t really grab me, so I went with the original COIN instead – Andean Abyss and the Colombian drug war. After all, if it wasn’t possible for people to learn from the original game then there wouldn’t be a series, would there? I’ve already documented my learning process on this blog (www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/learning-coin-andean-abyss) but what that didn’t cover was teaching and playing the game, which is what we’re here for!

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Learning COIN: Andean Abyss

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Learning COIN: Andean Abyss

Holy God this game is a lot easier to learn than Pendragon was. Part of that is certainly the familiarity with the system I developed over my two solo plays of Pendragon, but also there’s just a lot less going on and a lot less to keep track of! Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like Andean Abyss is a simple game, it’s more that I now see just how deep the water was where I first jumped in, and I understand why most people pick somewhere else. I know a lot of people learn with Cuba Libre, but for some reason the Cuban Revolution just doesn’t really appeal to me, so I decided that I should take a trip to South America instead. My knowledge of Colombian history is pretty limited, probably on par with a lot of Americans who are vaguely aware of the War on Drugs and its effects in Colombia but not much beyond that. I do know they have way too many hippos thanks to Pablo Escobar, but I’m not sure that will help me learn this game.

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First Impressions: Pendragon by GMT Games

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First Impressions: Pendragon by GMT Games

I have technically played Pendragon before when I sat down to learn the game (which you can read about here: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/learning-pendragon), but the first half of that game was with the aid of the playbook guiding all my actions and the second half was a fairly chaotic mess of indecision. I have since sat down and played the game for myself and I’m much more comfortable with playing it, but still feel a little out of my depth strategically. It is a real testament to the quality of the Pendragon playbook that I was able to complete my playthrough of the game without having read the rulebook. Sure, I referenced the rulebook fairly regularly – looking up specific rules and double checking how actions worked in specific situations – but I was able to play two entire Epochs without having to read the rules cover to cover. That’s impressive no matter what the game is, but doubly so with something as complicated as Pendragon. I intend to read the rules before tackling a full-length six Epoch game as there are definitely elements I still don’t fully understand, such as specifics of how the degradation of Roman rule functions, and over a long game those will probably come up more. I will also need to know the rules a lot better before tackling the enormous task of teaching Pendragon to other people, especially if they are relative COIN novices like myself. That all having been said, my experience playing a game of Pendragon was fascinating and I can’t wait to set it up again.

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Learning My First COIN: Pendragon from GMT Games

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Learning My First COIN: Pendragon from GMT Games

I spread Pendragon’s massive board over my tiny corner of counter space I’ve set aside for wargaming and was relieved to see that it just about fit. There was no extra space, so the deck and any extra tokens would have to live on the board, but there was space in the various sea locations to make that an acceptable compromise. Pendragon’s board is gorgeous, and the components deeply satisfying to place and push around. That said, it’s also a bit of a bear to set up – there are so many bits of wood to put down to mark the status of Britain before the Roman collapse. I left the game up over the weekend, playing turns whenever I could grab a few minutes, which was definitely better than trying to set it up and learn it all in one go. After having spent a good few hours with it over several days I can confidently say that I know how to take actions in Pendragon: The Fall of Roman Britain, whether I actually know how to play the game is another matter entirely!