Gaming Resolutions 2009 - Recap

Good Goddess, another year come and gone. Along with my eyesight and... uhm, never mind. 

Last year I came up with ten resolutions for gaming in 2009. How did I do?

1. Play through the SPQR Deluxe battles using Simple rules. Fail. I may try this again at some point with the regular rules. Simple is nice, but it was hard to use the light troops effectively and the battles all started to feel very samey samey after three plays. Definitely too ambitious. 
2. Team Monster Game. Fail. To my credit, we had this lined up for WBC West, but the scenario choice and Chuck's sudden legal adventure in CA killed it. This will probably resurrect itself for 2010. 
3. Contribute back to the hobby. Sure. Maybe not in the ways I've intended, but I did do some work on this blog with the excellent D-Day on Omaha Beach solitaire game, and have tried to give my impressions of many of the games that I got this year. I will continue to praise companies that do well and critique those that don't respond when I ask them for a fix. However, this won't be a "goal" per se in 2010.
4. Try New Companies. Success. DVG, Victory Point Games, Khyber Pass, even Perry Moore's company. I even ended up with a Fifth Column game in Where There is Discord. The market remains small and this will not be a goal that carries over to next year. 
5. Play a full campaign game. Success. Surprisingly, I had thought this a fail until I remembered my campaign game of Combat Commander: Stalingrad with Matt R. OK, perhaps not by definition what I was trying to do, but close enough. This will probably remain a goal for 2010. 
6. Play at least one naval game. Success. I got through most of two Flying Colors scenarios, and a good chunk of a Second World War At Sea game with Eric. However, I find that anything other than strategic level loses me to some extent. 
7. Burning Blue. Fail. What can I say? After seeing how little the Germans had to do in RAF: Eagle, I can see why this has been so difficult to pull off. 
8. Play two long term games on VASSAL. Fail. All the games I started died within a few days or weeks. Must be my breath. Seriously, I find that while VASSAL is a great system, I really prefer the feel of cardboard and a person sitting across the table from you. This goal won't propagate either. 
9. Get through the Conflict of Heroes scenarios. Fail. This one may pop back up. I'm planning a major event at GameStorm in March, perhaps that will get me motivated to get through the system. Now it would be via the Storm of Steel version since it has new rules. 
10. Attend an out of town con. Not really. I did get to Lorna's EGG mini-con in Eugene, as well as WBC West nano-con in May, but nothing out of state. I didn't even make it to the March GameStorm because of events that had been planned for me. There's a NY's Resolution, no more letting other people plan my life. This year, I intend to return to WBC, the "real" one, hell or high water. Maybe a GMT Games West as well in October. 

That's a 40% success rate, which indicates that I shot high. Part of the problem was picking goals that *seemed* like good ideas, but really weren't. SPQR is a great example - I had little experience with larger scenarios and knew the shortcomings of the Simple GBOH system, but picked it anyway. Having games that didn't fit in poster frames but needed to be set up for more than a few days was part of the problem as well. The same goes for VASSAL - online games are a distant second to face-to-face gaming for me, so pushing to settle for second was a bad choice, even if I had trouble getting opponents out to Wilsonville regularly. 

I'll put up my 2010 gaming resolutions in the next day or two after I've let them percolate for a bit.