Friends and acquaintances and colleagues know that the last couple of years have been pretty rough for me. Two Christmases ago, my father died. Last winter, my personal life underwent a great upheaval that is still not settled. And this year, a new job took me away from strategy gaming as intently as I once did. Throw in a big move, live trauma, family crises, evening contracts, desires to try new things and the like and 2011 will go down as the year I most needed but also the one I most want to go away.

This has been a problem for the blog, of course. Though the National Character series and podcast brought many, many new readers, Flash of Steel has been in a weird place. The promised video series has been stalled (but is not dead), I blog about fewer new games since I am in a sampling place more than a drinking deeply place, and my gaming reflections have become more general and more abstract – this is where someone should end their thoughts, not begin them.

As I think on my personal strategy gaming year, I think about:

1) Still playing a lot of Civilization 5 even though it is inferior in many important ways to Civilization 4. Civ 5 has its own bits of genius, but shouldn’t I be sticking with the best complete version?

2) Playing through Tropico 4, even though it is a whimsical city builder of little challenge and an overabundance of personality. It’s a quality product with a challenge level aimed right at the mass consumer audience, even though its theme isn’t exactly mainstream. And it’s still too easy to be a nice guy. But I finished it and enjoyed it.

3) Watching the development of a 4x game from the inside of my job and dealing with the challenges of publicizing a game in a subgenre of a genre that doesn’t really “show” well without amazing assets and dramatic video. Finding “hooks” for strategy games isn’t that easy.

4) Watching the early stages of a card playing/RPG and being amazed at how simple aesthetics in the hands of a skilled designer can have people begging for more.

5) Panzer Corps and how it brought back old memories – good and bad – of a game design that is a little bit stale in many ways, even as the game itself remains rewarding for a shrinking audience of “casual WW2 tank pushers”.

6) Seeing the podcast grow, change and thrive under my friend Rob Zacny’s guidance. It hasn’t all been smooth, but I am confident I did the right thing. When I win the lottery, it comes back to me, but he’s my equal here.

7) Not playing Anno 2070 at all or Six Gun Saga as much as I wanted or even buying a bunch of wargames that I should know. Intimately. Days are too short, my mind too old.

8.) Telling stories about my experiences in the Crusader Kings 2 preview and getting laughs and questions from non-strategy gamers. Still very much a Paradox game, but built for story tellers.

9) Buying the Korean DLC for Civ 5 because I am a sap.

10) Doing consulting on board game development because it sounded cool and then realizing how out of my depth I am, but loving the process.

So yeah. 10 points.

My job in PR makes it very, very difficult for me to do the usual End of Year Awards thing. To exclude a priori games that I worked with would not be fair to them and would set the precedent that I could never mention how good I thought Anomaly Warzone Earth was. Including them introduces the opposite problem – what is marketing and what is truth? I hope that the work I will be doing this month will give you some idea what games I played, liked and disliked and why without mentioning a lot of names, but this is the time of year for Awards and Honours.

So I decided to Award and Honour my friends and colleagues. I sent an invitation to a number of peers in journalism, blogging, development and life to write guest posts on their strategy gaming reflections from 2011. Some could not do it, but I am happy with the ones that said they could.

Some didn’t answer at all, and Santa knows where they live.

For the next few weeks, you will be seeing guest posts from people whose writing and opinions I respect. Some of the names will be familiar, some not, but all are people I wanted to help make the end of 2011 at Flash of Steel something worth visiting.

No awards from me. No prizes. No Best/Worst.

Just some writing and opinions. Which is sort of the point anyway.