I felt that having a humongous post about everything that went on at Dragon*Con would be a bit absurd. Here is installment II of the series.
Gaming has been a part of my hobby set since I was 10 or so (Jenn’s been playing since age 4!). I still remember the worried look on my mother’s face when I told her I wanted to start playing D&D. She had heard all the media-hyped stories about kids who’d committed suicide when their character died, or practiced “satanism”, or tortured the neighor’s turtle, or something. Thankfully, she got over it.
Since then, I’ve played D&D, AD&D, D&D 3.0 (not yet 3.5), Shadowrun, Call of Cthulu (Congrats, you’re insane!), GURPS, and several other role playing games. However, I’ve always liked playing board and miniature games more, especially battle simulators. Battletech is one of my favorites. Axis and Allies is good, but long, Risk, Warhammer 40K, the list goes on.
When I was in high school and college, I would attend at least 2 game conventions a year at various locations. Thusly, whenever I go to a con I always try to squeeze in some gaming and come home with something new. Dragon*Con is no exception.
This year, I’ve been introduced to Pirates which tickled my fancy. It is an age-of-sail “miniatures” war game. 
The goal is to gather the booty and terrorize the neighborhood. To that end, you purchase (yes, I know, they sucked me in) booster packs which contain ships and other sundries on credit-card type platic cards. You snap the ship pieces out of the card, assemble them together and poof! you’ve got yourself a navy. Different ships can do different things, and you sail around exploring islands for treasure and trying to knock your opponents masts down. I had great fun playing it, even though I got romped by the group I was with. In my defence I hadn’t even read the rules, so I was making stupid mistakes*.
We managed to squeeze in a round of Battletech. I made the mistake of giving into an insanity and had one of my ‘mechs destroyed during a charge. Alas… The interesting thing we noted was the age of the people who would stop by and say, “Wow, Battletech! I haven’t played that for years!” Unfortunately, Btech seems to be on the wane, to my grave despair.
We played Frag, a Steve Jackson game based on computer games such as Doom and Quake. Yes, it’s a board game based off a computer game. Odd.
We also squeezed in a game of Ticket to Ride: Europe with the maximum number of players (5). I’d never played it with 5 people before. It was frustrating not being able to complete your routes because 4 other people are all trying to get though Zurich!
The gaming was all great fun. As the title mentioned, I got to blow shit up, and that’s what it’s all about.
*I was playing in a “tournament” wherein the player with the most gold got a prize, the player who sank the most ships got a prize, and the player who did the worst (lost the most ships) also got a prize. I played so badly, I didn’t even come in last. No prize for Captain William…
Leave a Reply