A Common Theme

I'm thinking that a lot of these upates are going to follow a pretty common thread. That's not really surprising as I really don't vary my schedule at all. Wednesday nights I play boardgames from ~7:30 until roughly midnight. Saturdays, I might get together with Jason and play Magic or Twilight Imperium Armada. Saturdays are generally 2 person days. Sundays, I game with Dan, Jason and some guys they know. We typically run a Shadowrun campaign, although it varies slightly. We just started a World of Darkness campaign and last week we played Shadows Over Camelot instead of running a roleplaying session.

And that's pretty much all I do. I work and I game. I bought a Gamecube not too many weeks ago, but I haven't even really gotten a chance to use it.

I've been writing this over the last hour at work, and I've kinda run out of steam. I'll talk about Battlestations some other time. It's definitely worth talking about.

One final note before I end this. Kevin said something last night about doing things online so that people would see them and think you're cool. I can definitely see that. On the other hand, I'm not really writing this for an audience. At least not one I have in mind. It's more of a catharsis for me at work. I'm using it as a diary. It has the advantage over a paper diary in that I can use it at work and look like I'm working.

Gaming

As I may have said earlier, I play boardgames every Wednesday evening. Last night's group was smaller than usual with both Dan and Kevin bowing out for the evening. Jason brought A Game of Thrones with but we decided to hold off until Kevin could join us to play.

So we ended up playing Axis & Allies. It was the first game I've played to completion with the new edition. It's very different, there have been a lot of changes. Necessary ones, but a lot of them.

I was going recount the game in detail, but I got distracted by something else. What was it again? Oh yeah, work. In any event, the game was pretty short. Matt played the Allies, Jason was Japan, which left me with Germany. Russia came into Germany pretty heavily on the first turn and the Germans did little to stop them. Germany took back 2/3 of the land Russia claimed and ferried Rommel to N. Africa. Britain then took W. Europe. Which was particularly devastating as we were playing with National Advantages. Britain was allowed to place 3 free infantry in France.

The game continued for a few turns in this fashion. Germany fighting off invasions on both fronts looked and built more like Russia than Germany. Through the sacrifice of the German navy and Luftwaffe, the Allied transports in the Atlantic were destroyed, buying valuable time to reclaim the Eastern Front.

During this, Japan was doing extremely well in the Pacific. Japan claimed a British Industrial Complex in India on the first turn, and expelled the Americans from China within two turns. America began building an invasion fleet to invade the Home Isles. Russia over extended and collapsed back to Moscow and Karelia, leaving much of E. Europe open to German blitzing. Great Britain's fleet began to loom ominously in the Atlantic while the Americans sat just outside of Japan. Russia attempted to rebuild to prevent a German takeover but ended up losing a vital production area in Karelia to the Japanese of all people, essentially removing them from the game. America attempted an uphill battle to invade Japan proper. With the survival of a single transport, victory would be assured as the Japanese army was fighting in the mainland. Unfortunately for the good ol' US of A, the dice weren't with them and they were ignominiously defeated. The Allies conceded, bringing the game to a close in 3 1/2 hours. A good time for Axis and Allies.

Overall impressions, the changes to the balance between Axis & Allies was sorely needed. Axis still start in something of a hole, but not so deep of one. Lucky dice rolling on the part of the Axis is enough to generally balance the two sides.

I planned to talk about other things, but they slip my mind. Ah, well.