I recently had the great pleasure to play another game of Legions Imperialis; I’ve written about some previous games here. This time I brought what I expected to be a decidedly unbalanced and thoroughly uncompetitive, but hopefully fun and destructive, 2000pt list.
Calyx – the name comes from the Greek term for a husk or seed pod – is a real-time strategy game where the twist is that you’re not fighting against a mirror of yourself, constructing sprawling bases and churning out deathblobs of units to smash together, nor even fighting asymmetric opponents with different types of units and abilities, but rather you are fighting the creeping growth of plant life that spreads out across the map.
Naturally, given that it is the year 2026 and all humanity’s sins are brazenly on display, our species is not covering itself in glory here. The plot is fun: in essence, a slower than light starship with its crew in stasis has reached its destination, and most of the ship and crew are pretty fucked, thanks for asking. The one survivor is the chef, who the ship’s AI immediately rockets down toward the planet to start beginning mining operations. Because why else would anyone travel, really, other than to gather delicious, colourful mineral ore?
I’m under the weather these past few days, grappling with some sort of virus. Assuming I don’t get around to writing something new over the weekend, here is something I wrote in late 2024, fleshing out a little backstory for my character in our Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy RPG group. Have fun puzzling out what was redacted!
We’ll reach our group’s three year anniversary this May, which is a little shocking to realise, but in fairness to the story our GM has planned out, we have done a spectacular job of going off-mission and generally doing ridiculous things.
Across this past year, I have played something like 91 different video games. The actual figure will be higher, as there’s a lot of stuff I try and discard and forget to write down. As we’ll soon see, the difference between the list of things I played and things I finished is very stark. I’m very okay with this state of affairs; many games these days are hugely time-demanding to see through to their conclusion, and as should be obvious from the other 2025 posts I’ve published this week, I spend my time on many different media – and that’s not even mentioning my own creative efforts.
Note that I’ve included demos in this list, as I want to remember the stuff I tried out as in many cases I will follow up on it quite a bit later. Other times it’s just interesting to note stuff I tried, even if I don’t expect I will play the full game, such as DreamCore. Also, a demo is a game, it’s just a small piece of one, and as established this isn’t a list of games I finished.
As with my 2025 in film post, I won’t say much about most of these games. I will identify the games I actually finished in bold, and anything I played a lot will get some sort of comment. Otherwise I’ll only remark on things I thought particularly interesting, whether for positive or negative reasons.
It’s been a slow year for hobbying, following on from an even slower year for hobbying. Aside from something really stupid (which I did finish and I do really like, so I might eventually finish writing about that and share some photos) I can’t even recall what I might have built and painted last year. That despite moving into a new apartment, large enough to dedicate an entire room to hobbying. Thin gruel indeed, but life has its challenges and hobbying, after all, is a luxury.
So in comparison, 2025 was a highly productive year, and it was thoroughly dominated by one game: Legions Imperialis.
Over the last few months I’ve been lucky enough to play a few games of Legions Imperialis, Games Workshop’s 2023 epic scale game set in the Horus Heresy (aka. that time all the chads and chuds in powered armour were slapping one another about). I actually picked up a copy last year, but it took me a good six months to build and paint everything in the starter box. Life is hard, ok.
My opponent for both games was the inestimable Michael Halila, and he’s written some great battle reports over on his blog, Freodom. I won’t attempt to recreate the wheel, but I will summarise a few of my own thoughts regarding both games.
This weekend I played my first game of Blood Bowl Second Season, and in so doing introduced my girlfriend to the real beautiful game!
Initially we had planned it to be an introductory game that lasted just a few turns, to learn the rules before we started playing properly. In the end we played 6 turns before calling it for the evening, and the next day we returned to the game and played through the remainder. Sadly, there are no photos of the game, although most of the teams are as-yet unpainted, as we chose to start playing before painting our teams.
I brought a Lizardman team; I’ve been wanting to play them since the days of Cyanide’s first Blood Bowl videogame, when a friend would field them against my Dwarves. The lineup was 4 Skink Runners, 2 Chameleon Skinks, 4 Saurus and a Kroxigor, with 2 team re-rolls available. The Mesozoic Marauders roared defiance from their dug-out!
They were up against a Shambling Undead team consisting of 3 Skeleton Linemen, 2 Zombie Linemen, 2 Mummies, 2 Ghoul Runners, and 2 Wight Blitzers. Also boasting a juicy 3 re-rolls, the Frytown Gooligans huddled, mumbled, drooled and snarled gutturally as they strategized pre-game!
2023 is dying, and 2024 struggles to be born. It continues to be a time of monsters.
Er, apologies to paraphrase Gramsci and then to roll straight into a 2023 round-up post. If it’s any consolation, these things are hard to think up openings for.
September was a busy month for both my partner and myself, and we didn’t play too many board games. I sense this will change in the near future, as several Kickstarters I backed look to be delivering before the end of the year, and as the Finnish climate turns colder we’ll be spending more social time indoors! That said, I’m away quite a bit in October, and am planning to participate in a miniature painting competition, so it might be November before we play much more.
All that aside there were two notable pools into which we dipped our toes; two large games that felt beyond the scale of most games we’ve previously played. The first of these was Twilight Imperium. Together with four other friends, including several from our Dark Heresy TTRPG group (something Claire and I have been doing for a few months now, and about which I might write something someday), we played what turned out to be a test game.
This is not really a post about Starfield. This is a post about my feelings about Starfield, as squeezed through the cheesecloth that is almost two decades of playing the same game, and often writing or talking about it.
It’s weird looking back over this stuff. Eleven years of posts and podcasts documenting how I grew tired of Elder Scrolls gameplay, and how I came back to it again and again, each time I found the experience more grating, and sooner.
These past experiences made clear to me that I was unlikely to get much out of Starfield. Given that, I didn’t plan to play it. But Microsoft own Bethesda these days, and that means Starfield is a day one Game Pass release. So I had to check whether my expectations would be met, you see.
As for your expectations: don’t read this if Starfield is your new favourite game and you just can’t bear to hear that someone on the internet didn’t like it. Really, don’t bother. Neither of us will get much out of how that would play out.
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