Archive for the ‘Other Games’ Category
Should I Stay Or Should I Go Now? – a meta post on concessions
I concede games quite often. More often, I suspect, than is widely considered proper, and perhaps more often than I should. It’s come to my attention of late that my motives in so doing are frequently unclear. If even the woman I love is sufficiently in the dark about said motives to be greatly confused and offended by my bowing out of a board game (and she is), it’s clear that some territory needs to be staked out and explored, and a case for concessions made.
The Magics I Will Not Be Gathering
I have something of a storied history with Magic, as you may already know if you’ve been hanging around here for a while. I played for a few increasingly depressing years in secondary school, and dropped out at around the same time that the competitive mentality had gripped our teenage-boy minds to the point where endless third turns and infinite quantities of tokens were the rule rather than the exception.
Last year I found out that those rotten bastards I used to play Mage with have started up with the Magic and the playing of the Magic again, and that they have wrapped their hands firmly around the reins to steer the Magic Wagon straight for Casualton (it’s in the County of Scrubshire, but on the edge, not in the middle by Loserborough or Nobber-upon-Rant).
And it’s been fun, so far, throwing down with these people, to the point where they bought me a shiny new deck (although it’s green/red, not really my thing, I still appreciate the effort) and where I’ve picked up some lovely full art lands and a life counter and deck boxes and oh fuck what am I doing?
Anyway, the latest oh fuck what am I doing news is this.
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Ask Uncle Von: So What’s This Blood Bowl Thing Then?
A while back I promised docbungle I’d write up an introduction to Blood Bowl and now Panzar of Whelp Slayer has been asking about Blood Bowl too. I’ll talk briefly about the game itself, and about the Orc and Human starting teams (who represent two basic ways in which a good team is good). There will be pictures, but they won’t be of my Blood Bowl models because they are either not painted (bad Von!) or badly painted (bad former owner!). The pictures are all used without permission in the spirit of fair use (and promoting this AWESOME game that you presumably like if you’ve taken pictures of it) and if you want me to stop using yours you only have to ask.
So! Blood Bowl.
Von’s 2011, From Can To Can’t
Last year, on the recently defunct Year of Frugal Gaming blog, I made something resembling a public commitment to something akin to Resolutions for what was then the New Year of 2011 (the Year of the Free Lance? Our normal custom of giving silly names to years kind of petered out with the Year of the Trouser a while back, although Shiny has seen fit to resurrect it for 2012, of which more later). Here’s what I said:
This year, at best guess, I have probably spent about £500 on gaming. I am going to spend less than £500 on gaming next year. I am not going to set myself a defined figure to feel guilty about, but I am going to spend less.
I’ve got some New Year’s Resolutions to make. I am going to make some buildings to go on that battlefield, and I’m not going to buy any new miniatures until those buildings are done and look good. I am also not going to buy any new miniatures until all the Dark Elves, and all the Skorne, and all the Tyranids, and all the Cryx, are painted, AND I am only going to buy one new thing at a time.
So, in other words, if I buy a new unit for one army, that’s got to be built, painted, used and played out… and I’m not going to rush off and have four projects on the go all at once.
And here’s how it went…
Meta Gaming: Wheat From The Chaff
The back end of a year customarily sets one thinking in a state-of-the-system, stock-taking kind of mould. New possessions are acquired, room must be made, consideration of how they’re to fit into collections undergone. Doing so invariably indentifies a certain amount of absolute tat that just has to go, and a certain amount of stuff which might be perfectly valid in its own right but reduces efficiency in that of which it is a part. Chaff, in other words.
