SNAFU

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

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).

First Impressions: Equatorial Clash by Marc Figueras

First Impressions: Equatorial Clash by Marc Figueras

Equatorial Clash is not the kind of game I am usually drawn to. It’s a modern warfare game depicting events in the 1940s that uses NATO symbols for its units - usually I run from games like that. However, two items drew me to pick it up when I was placing an order with SNAFU games, SNAFU being an excellent online retailer in Spain and publisher of their own line of small to small-ish games. The first, and most striking thing, was the art design by Nils Johansson. Nils is definitely one of if not the most interesting graphic designers working in wargames at the moment and any time I see something he has worked on it will immediately draw a second (or third…or fourth) look from me. The other element was that this was about a conflict I had literally never heard of. Far from being the more conflict of the mid-20th century, this game is about the Peru-Ecuador border war of 1941. Given its amazing appearance and obscure topic, how could I not try it?