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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
As I think on my personal strategy gaming year, I think about:<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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”. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
9) Buying the Korean DLC for Civ 5 because I am a sap.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So yeah. 10 points.<\/p>\n
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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Some didn’t answer at all, and Santa knows where they live.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n No awards from me. No prizes. No Best\/Worst.<\/p>\n Just some writing and opinions. Which is sort of the point anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[23,14,21],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-Vk","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3554"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3554"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3559,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3554\/revisions\/3559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}