Round of Applause to MattW

[Matt W]

Thanks all. It was a blast.

I mentioned during the year that we had purchased a puppy who for several months needed a human minder. Not a bad dog just one who needed to be house trained extensively. Since my daughter provided the oversight all day, she requested my help at night from 7 to until 11 or so. The puppy slept most of that time, but when she got up it was usually time to go out so someone needed to be there to get the right mindset for the dog. I said that I would and started picking out scenarios that could be played reasonably in one sitting of 3-4 hours or less.

As time wore on the dog needed less oversight and I noticed that I had played scenarios from a very wide list of products and supplements. Also, somewhere along this trip I finally came into possession of Lions which was perfectly unattainable up to that point. That gave me possession of all of the printed PG products. It was a simple matter to take some time and see which ones needed to be played to flesh out the whole list. My scenario playing slowed down from 20-25 per month to a more reasonable (according to my wife) 8 or so a month, but I was able to pick and choose from a targeted group of products and actually managed to finish at the beginning of June, just before the cutoff for the PG-HQ "year".

What was especially fun was going back through several of the products where I had already played all the scenarios and enjoying some of them again. It is easy to think that PG has limited replay value but I can attest to the fun of playing again. In addition, I am finding that replaying a scenario that I have played solo, with an opponent provides a whole new window on it. Shad has mentioned it before but the scenarios and the game as a whole takes on a very different caste in face to face. The neat thing about the system is that it actually works well in both solitaire and face to face play. That is not something that can be said for all game systems. By the way, hidden units provide a wonderful experience in face to face play and alter most scenarios tremendously. I feel that I do a good job of pretending I don't know where the hidden units are when I play solo but playing these with an opponent points out that there are a whole batch of approaches to this idea that I simply haven't considered.

I will say that I was incredibly lucky to get this done now. With multiple new products coming out every year the list gets longer and longer. I just hope that I can keep increasing my percentage of scenarios played from year to year. Just think of it, if you have 20% of the existing scenarios played and 200 new scenarios come out in a year, you will need to play 40 just to keep from falling back!

I have two current goals for this year. On the solitaire side I'm looking at completing some products (South Flank for starters, love the laser cut counters). On the face to face side, Hugmenot and I are looking at completing the Brave But Futile campaign in Panzer Lehr (see Let's Play PG! for a running commentary).