Happy New Year to everyone, and I hope 2018 is good to you.

Now that I look back on 2017, I can see that my wargaming year has been a very successful one.

Here are a few highlights:

The September War

I've written and published two full IABSM scenario packs this year, both covering the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 in what is known as The September War.

That's over sixty early war scenarios to play, and loads of different scenario mechanics that can be adapted for other periods.

Sales have not been amazing (not like Blenneville or Bashnya), but then how many people have an early war Polish army? It was, anyway, quite a labour of love...and I'm enjoying playing them.

2018: Blitzkrieg

Also, although there's still plenty still to do, I'm well into my next project: producing the early war theatre booklet for IABSM.

Here I'm concentrating very much on the Battle for France (and Belgium and the Nederlands), as the Polish lists are already done and available for free elsewhere on this site.

More news in the new year, but the section on the French army is already about 70 pages long!

Painting

A good year as regards painting, with three full sci-fi armies completed: the Xar, the Hura and the Tah-Sig.

On top of that, I've really fleshed out my Poles, and chewed through a couple of units that have been sitting in the lead mountain for far too long.

I didn't quite hit last year's points score in the Painting Challenge, but am within Ame's Ace of equaling it. In fact, it's fair to say that if I'd finished the half-completed unit currently in prime position on the table I'd be ahead...but then I'm writing this rather than doing that!

Gaming

Much to my surprise, and with everything going on in my life apart from gaming, I've actually had more games this year than I have for any year for some time.

Still a small score (19 battles) compared to a club weekly gamer, but then I have a long commute, don't belong to a club, have a demanding family and do a lot of sport as well.

I've also written up every game except one for this site, so feel that I have been spreading the IABSM Lard as much as possible.

My thanks (and apologies if I was an a**e!) to all my opponents. Better luck next time!

Vis Lardica

Finally, just a quick note on the fortunes of this website itself.

Traffic is up year on year across all the metrics used to measure websites. That's Uniques (number of visitors), Page Views, Dwell Time etc.

For those interested, in 2017 there were about 61,500 page views from about 14,000 unique visitors (i.e. if you visit in Feb and Nov, you still only count as one unique). On average, just over 1,000 people visit the site twice each month, looking at 2.5 pages per visit.

Which is not bad going.

Key to more traffic is links on other sites, so if you do run your own blog, and enjoy Vis Lardica, please include a link in your list of recommended blogs. Let me know you've done so, and I'll plug your site on here in return.

It might be slightly more complicated to do so because I'm on Squarespace not Blogger or one of the other free hosting sites (yes, it costs me money to keep a site of this size going!) but do please try. It will help spread the Lard even further.

So, all in all, a very good year. Let's hope 2018 is even better!

Happy New Year

Robert Avery