Lord of the Games

Poe is Lord of the Rings

Yesterday was game day. A thirteen-hour marathon session of board games, food and fellowship, and lots of friendly trash talk. I love game days. I know when a lot of folks think of board games they think Monotony... I mean Monopoly, Clue, Sorry, Trivial Pursuit and Hungry, Hungry Hippos... games in the family/party genre.

When I talk board games I am talking historical, war, empire building, exploration, fantasy worlds and global domination. Anyway, ten of us guys got together yesterday and played Memoir '44, History of the World, Moon Shot (or as it is commonly called, Ted’s Silly Moon Landing Game. I could not find this game on the Internet), Axis & Allies, Pirate's Cove, Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne. My favorite games of the day were Pirate’s Cove and Carcassonne, except that we weren’t actually playing Carcassonne by the actual rules because Gary, the owner of the game and usually the resident ‘rule Nazi’ ‘misinterpreted’ the rules and we were actually playing incorrectly, but since we were all playing by the same incorrect rules it was okay… I guess. Honest rules misinterpretations I can live with, but don’t change the rules in the middle of the game. Stick with the ones you start with and play it through or start over. I really think it would help if the person running a particular game would at least review the rules before game day and not in the middle of play, but that may just be me. ;-) I also got involved in a six-player, six-hour long game of History of the World. A five to six player game of HotW goes on far too long and there is too much ‘player downtime’. ‘Player downtime’ is when you are just sitting there waiting to be involved again and wondering why in the hell am I playing this game anyway. PD gets real old real fast in a game that takes six plus hours to play with 5-6 players. I really do like HotW, but only with 3-4 players. No more 5-6 player games for me. These were not the only games available to us either. We never got to play the other dozen or so we had to choose from including the two pictured above. Those we will get to the next time. Much caffeine is consumed during these trash talking, competitive sessions of all day and into the night gaming. I made a two new friends - Eric and Henry - and I hope to be able to get together with them for games in the future. Well the game day started at noon and we played on until 1:00 AM Sunday and then had a half hour to clean up and pack up. Ted and I were so beat when we got home we left the games in the trunk of the car to be brought in the next morning. Waking up Sunday at 8:30 I stumbled downstairs and grabbed my coffee cup. Needing caffeine I went to 7/11 for my damn fine cup of coffee. Returning home I brought in two of the six games I took to game day. Poe promptly jumped up and perched on top them claiming them for kittydom and taking the title, Lord of the Rings. Crazy cat. Maybe we should have named him Sauron. On second thought... nah.