I am very happy to introduce Firepigeon as the one hundred and twenty third Geek of the Week. Manuel, enjoy your time in the spotlight.
Here is a link to his profile:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/user/Firepigeon
Firepigeon wrote:
Wow!! Helen, the queen of the tuckboxes, the one we all follow the steps of, was asking me to be GotW? Wow!!! Thank you Helen, for this unusual passage of the GotW; from one tuckbox maker to another (Helen's are better BTW!!). I just hope I measure up to a pale of your high standards!!
I'm 37 years, have been married for almost 17 and I'm father of a 9 years boy. I'm the crazy gamer of the family with my son learning from me. My wife can be persuaded to play some games, but not many.
When I was younger I played Monopoly, Petroleo and at some friend house Risk. On my teens I was fascinated by the board wargames I saw at magazines, but by this time I started on the computer to play that kind of games (they where starting to appear - my most vivid memory of that time, is the game Desert Rats on the ZX Spectrum - a pure hex and counter game translated to the computer). I was already married I found a little novel about mechwarriors that drove to find one amazing universe: Battletech!! This was the one that really started everything. I found a couple of players in my area, and together with a friend of mine we embarked on several years exploring this fantastic universe set by FASA. This included a plunge into the world of CCG's (Battletech CCG mostly).
Several years later the group got ourselves into Mordheim on what was my true first contact with the Games Workshop giant, also coupled with Warhammer 40000 for me. By this time my work entered heavily in the equation and I just stopped gamming for 4/5 years, and the gamming group just was gone. One day I just had enough. I was carving to get a hobby, because the house/work/house was completely killing me.
So it was somewhere in the beginning of 2005 that I started rounding around the old shops, finding some had gone for good, and a couple had been created. I was considering at the time to start on Warhammer Fantasy Battles when I stumbled on Flames of War. A miniatures game ruleset on small units? tactics set on WWII. The community was just starting and I jumped the bandwagon.
Was around this time that I discovered BGG but it took almost 1 year lurking around to finally commit myself to the site. During much of 2005 I played mostly Flames of War. But the increasingly visits to the BGG where taking its tool. In 2006 I succumbed to the spell, and I started buying games, first looking for the solitaire wargames or games that could be played solitaire. Almost by the end of 2006 the Portuguese community was organizing itself around the site Abre O Jogo (roughly translated to 'open up the game'); to the point that on September 2006 there was the first Lisbon's group meet up. After this it has been a rollercoaster ride. The Portuguese community grew and my collection grew, not anymore limited to just solitaire wargames. 2007 saw the realization of the first Portuguese national meetups, from where it emerged the LeiriaCon 2008 organized by the great team at Spiel Portugal (most notably the two previous Portuguese GotW: Luis Filipe e Costa(fs1973) and Paulo Soledade(soledade) ).
Manuel Pombeiro
aka Firepigeon
LUDO ERGO SUM
Two truths and a lie:
1. I much prefer to spend my time gamming than I like to spend a full month preparing and painting an army.
2. I'm a full details maniac concerning organization of bits in a gamebox and even on the game table itself.
3. I rate Puerto Rico so low because I always end up been beaten at it.
Posted Sun Jan 13, 2008 7:33 am
!!!
) we just have to rely on online stores. For more mainstream games or more latest eurogames there's now a local trend that we may get them in a reasonable timeframe.
She really doesn't like to game mainly because she doesn't like to loose 
the ones I don't have!! 
??? It’s amazing