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Hilary Hartman
United States
Wilmore
Kentucky
My avatar was cross-stitched by my wife, Robin! She's cool like that, not to mention being one helluva ASL opponent.
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What a fun-filled weekend of gaming! Who would've thought such was possible, especially after my comments in my All Work and No Play discussion in the Wargames forum? Maybe every game wasn't a hex-and-counters experience, but it was pretty close.
Yesterday morning, my wife,
Robin
United States
Wilmore
Kentucky
sat across the table from me and played the Long Island scenario of Hold the Line. A while back I foolishly traded away one of her all-time favorite games Clash for a Continent: Battles of the American Revolution and French & Indian War, so I'd made amends by picking up the Worthington Games re-release. Sure, I'll have to get the Hold the Line: French and Indian War Expansion Set set one day, but for now the base set will do just fine.
Anyhow, after set-up and a brief rules re-acclamation, we got down to business. The variable Action Point system each turn makes for a tense situation because, while you know how many base points you'll start with each turn, the idea that you may have 1-3 more to work with allows for all sorts of planning. Regardless, while her British forces made several attempts to encircle the American forces, I narrowly won the day by claiming six of her units (to the five of mine she'd gotten, two shy of her victory conditions) within turn fifteen.
Then, last night, I let my oldest son, Bailey, pick out a game to play. He looked in his closet and chose Monopoly: Spongebob Squarepants. We sat on the floor in the room he shares with his younger brother, Jakob, and played a shortened game of 90 minutes. The game seriously drips with theme, and the boys love the pewter figures, the references to the TV show, and trying to outdo each other by having the most money and property.
As they are both young, Bailey, 7, and Jakob, 6, the game really makes them utilize their math/counting skills. Plus, they have to wait their turn, and read any cards they pick-up. I was surprised the game went the whole 90 minutes, frankly, as usually one or both of them get bored. No, this time Jakob had to be asked to leave the room when he kept playfully kicking his brother in the side of his head. Keep in mind, we were sitting on the floor, and he is only 6...
In the end, Bailey handed me a defeat; he had $50 more dollars in property value, and over $200 more in cash. Jakob, and his money/properties, had been disqualified for his Kung-Fu fighting.
(And yes, it was a little bit frightening.)
This morning, the boys wanted to continue the on-going RPGing we'd been doing since the spring with Melee and Wizard. They each have a character; Bailey has "Superboy 4" which is a fighter/wizard hybrid, and Jakob has "Spiderman 5" an outright tank. The adventure they are playing is titled "The Hole in the Side of the Hill" which sprang from a bedtime story I'd been telling them since last year.
To catch you up-to-speed, all you need to know is this: An earthquake caused a hole to appear in the side of a hill on their family farm. Their father, known simply as "Dad," a former soldier in the king's army, went to investigate the hole and disappeared. In an earlier adventure, the two boys rescued their father from the hole in the hill, which was really a collapsed section of wall in a long-buried and forgotten complex.
Needless to say, the complex is home to snakes, giant spiders, skeletons, and a mysterious old man. Fighting their way to their father, the boys find him conversing with the older man, the latter giving the boys gifts for clearing the building of the monsters and coming to the rescue of their father. They returned to the family homestead to discover that their younger sister had been taken captive by marauding skeletons...this all happened over the course of several play sessions.
And this was where the story started today with Superboy 4 and Spiderman 5 searching for their sister. Besting a dire wolf, a skeleton and zombie, two goblins, and a troll, the brothers rescued the sister with much heroics! The session lasted almost two hours, our longest to date, and at the end they asked for a continuation...of course, about that time, several of the king's men appeared and said the boys had been called to the castle, the king having heard of their brave exploits...
Afterwards, a grand, real-life celebration ensued, with my own dad and mom coming over for a Father's Day lunch (lasagna, salad, bread, cake and coffee). Even now, my lovely wife is sleeping it off, while the kids watch the second Harry Potter movie in the living room.
Still, I was able to get one more game in today: Outlaws: Adventures in the Old West. I received a handmade copy from the designer himself in the mail earlier this week, and it sure is beautiful, and quick to learn. I've played more than a few games set in the American West of the 19th century (shoot, I even wrote and published a novel set in that time period...), and so far this game has been my favorite of the genre.
Sure, I liked Gunslinger, and I thought Cowboys: The Way of the Gun was okay, and I even dabbled in Legends of the Old West, not to mention giving Bang! a shot, but I really liked the weaving of dice and chit-draw mechanics combined with Action Points. Yeah, it was a solo game (my wife was starting to nod off into the magical world of Naptime when I walked into the room to see if she wanted to play), but once I set-up the map tiles and the character cards, the whole experience took less than 90 minutes as I read the rules and fought a quick, bloody shoot-out between Bill and Luke.
(For those keeping score, Luke took Bill down with one shot to the chest, one to the leg, and another to an arm, while Luke suffered only a grazing chest wound himself.)
So, now here I am, basking in the warm glow of a great gaming weekend with my family. I still have an urge to play something else, but time is beginning to ebb away and the night is drawing near. Perhaps, after the movie in the next room ends and the boys drift off to their own beds, I'll settle in with a good book.
Or maybe I'll fire up the laptop and play another scenario of Frozen Synapse, the tactical, turn-based PC game I found after it was suggested by our glorious leader,
Scott Alden
United States
Dallas
Texas
Aldie's Full of Love!
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Regardless, I hope you all have had a great weekend!
Take care,
Hil
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My avatar was cross-stitched by my wife, Robin! She's cool like that, not to mention being one helluva ASL opponent.
