Recent Gaming

I've been doing surprisingly little gaming recently. There's the Buffy game and the GURPS game and little bits of craziness in between, but that's been about it. Which for me isn't that much-- remember that I went 3+ nights a week for a good chunk of college.

I've been doing a lot of board gaming. Well, a fair amount, anyway. My friend/co-worker/neighbor Andy has a bunch of board games and we've been slowly working through them. Lately, it's been:

• 7 Wonders -- My current favorite. Played that one for the first time this weekend. I like how different it is from most of the games we play, and how much the landscape upon which you pick your strategy changes based on what your opponents/neighbors are doing.
• Stone Age -- Another favorite. Unfortunately, only played this one once. Reminds me a lot of Puerto Rico and Agricola except that when you get to the "good bit" where you can actually do things, you're only halfway through the game.
• Smallworld -- The simplest game that we play, and really good for that. This one handles the mix of skill levels/interests we sometimes have at the table the best. This one was my "favorite" before we played Stone Age, and it's still up there.
• Arkham Horror -- Fun, but very complicated, and some members of the group have played it much more than the others. Which causes problems, above and beyond the problems that co-operative games in general cause us.
• Pandemic -- Fun, but waaaay too co-operative for this group.
• Puerto Rico -- The game about slavery! See: Stone Age.
• Agricola -- The game about subsistence farming! See: Stone Age. Also, when I first played this game I'd consumed 2 Michelob Ultra Dragonfruit (to my unending sorrow) so I'd probably like it and understand it much better if I was sober.
• Illuminati -- Played this one for the first time in high school. (Game design class.) Still a classic.
• Twilight Imperium -- Fascinating. Unfortunately, takes way too long for a weeknight, and tough to get enough people together who are into that kind of thing to make it worth it.
• There are probably some others that I'm forgetting right now.

I keep meaning to start up the text game I was running for Trollsmyth again, but life keeps interfering. I've discovered over the past couple of weeks that I am terribly, terribly sensitive to disruptions in my routine.

I'm currently planning/pondering my summer game. My little brother will be back from college in a few weeks and I want to run something with and for him while he's down here. That's what that GrimDark Racing business was all about. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find my copy of the GURPS corebooks and there's a little bit of prep-work that I'd want to do before he gets back next weekend.

So, instead, I might just run Regular Fucking D&D. I've got that itch again-- the hexcrawl, wilderness exploration, race-and-class, dungeoncrawl itch. I flipped through a copy of the 3e Forgotten Realms guide and that got me thinking in terms of straight, "high fantasy" D&D for the first time in a while. It bugs me that this is something that I keep wanting to run even though I've never had any particular success with it.