Pub Games

I met up with Les again last night for our regular pub game session. Not darts or dominoes, but Battle Line and Blue Moon. I love both these games hugely, although at the moment Battle Line really makes my head spin with the intensity of the decision making. Won the Battle Line, but lost the Blue Moon. The Blue Moon loss was especially humbling, as after losing with the Mimix to Les's Pillar,we swapped decks, and I managed to lose again just as convincingly with the Pillar. Ah well, it's not the decks then......

Les is an amiable and challenging opponent, the real ale was good - what more could I ask for?

Tag: boardgames

Near Miss

I popped into the Aldershot game shop on Saturday for a self-indulgent browse. I do enjoy living so close to this place - when I lived in Salisbury I used to make a very infrequent pilgrimage to Aldershot, 50 miles each way just to see the long shelves loaded with game boxes.

Anyway, as soon as I walked in last Saturday, there was the War of the Ring Expansion, glowing with glorious artwork, pristine in its shrinkwrap. This game is on my BGG wishlist, it should have been an immediate purchase, but .....I just couldn't do it. Another 78 plastic figures to paint? Right now, I just don't have the heart for it.....

Tag: boardgames

The Methuselah of Gameblogging?

It's a big day for nimrods - our 5th birthday! Hard to believe I've been doing this since April 2001. I reckon that makes this the world's oldest gameblog (note, I didn't say the world's oldest gameblogger - at least I hope not). Mikko started about a year after me, and I can't think of any others of similar vintage. But my memory is not what it was (too much blogging), so please correct me if you know otherwise......

Any regular readers out there? What was your favourite nimrods posting? Drop me a comment and let us know.

Easter Monday at Green Dragons

The weather was doing stuff - Andy explained it all. There was wind and it had a direction and speed, and there were clouds doing things, and sunshine and stuff.....anyway.

Highlights of the day:

1) Andy's scary haircut. Looks like he's going back to his roots in the paras.

2) The Green Dragons mud-surfing competition. See who can get dragged furthest and fastest. Bonus points for weight of mud attached to clothes at end of day. Lots of entrants, no clear winner.

3) Steve's party trick - the "look no legstraps" take-off.

4) Ash smashes my previous tree-extraction time, recovering his wing from the bushes in a mere 2 hours.

Tag: paragliding

This is Holy Week

Looking at Stars

The God of curved space, the dry
God, is not going to help us, but the son
whose blood splattered
the hem of his mother's robe.

-- Jane Kenyon

I think it is high time that there was a legal obligation on companies to consider the environment and their communities, not just shareholder returns, when they are making decisions. So I am signing up as a supporter of CoRe. I've spent most of my working life in big corporations. But if this campaign was to succeed I would sleep at night with a clearer conscience.

Timewasting

Dave came over for a weekend of boardgaming. Unfortunately we squandered the Saturday - wasted precious hours wandering in the countryside and the sunshine, followed by a good meal and an evening of camaraderie in the pub. Such a a waste of irreplaceable gaming time!

However by Sunday lunchtime we had at last got organised with our first (and I suspect not our last for many a long year) game of C&C Ancients. As hoary grognards we despised the very concept of a beginners scenario and went straight into Lake Trasimene. What great fun! And what a nicely judged feel of ancient linear tactics from such a modest rulebook! Dave's Romans had a real chance of victory on a final dice roll, but just failed to save the day.

In many ways I have the feeling that C&C Ancients is the game I have been looking for ever since I first painted a DBA army 15 years ago, and decided that my eyesight and patience really wasn't up to much more of this. Great Battles of History was appealing, but after hours grappling with the ruleset and stacking piles of fiddly markers, SPQR got passed on to another home. But this ..... could it be The One?

After lunch Simon turned up - a pleasant surprise which allowed us to play Euphrat & Tigris, reliving the glory days of 2003. Dave played very aggressively, and I put in a truly mediocre performance for a final scoreboard of 13,11,8. Still, even a bad game of Euphrat & Tigris beats a good game of pretty much anything else. Excepting perhaps C&C Ancients.....

Tag: boardgames