Fall Semester Kickoff

I've been neglecting this blog, partially because I've just gotten too busy to be an organizer, and I've settled back to being a player again. But I thought I'd still provide some highlights from the first weeks of MEK OP:

• Currently our big games have all been Warhammer. We usually have two tables of 40k going at once, and Kyle is finishing another set. So that seems likely to be a focus for the near future. We also have a Rogue Trader RPG campaign on Tuesdays, and for that matter, we also played a round of Death Angel on Saturday (and died horribly on the second floor). So I guess we've pretty much got everyone playing some version of Warhammer now. It's like a virus!

• We have a lot of board games now, and not nearly enough players for them. Yesterday I saw Carcassonne, Memoir 44, Empire Builder, Axis and Allies, my own copy of Conquest of Nerath, Axis and Allies, and all the old Fantasy Flight and casual card game stuff from last year. Vox is still designing his own RPG system too.

• I'm investing in a couple new games that I bought over eBay:
• Twilight Struggle is currently the highest ranked game on the BGG ratings, and so I thought I'd buy a copy to see what all the fuss is about. It's a two-player card-and-map game that simulates political events during the cold war. It's a GMT game (like Space Empires), so it will probably be fairly concise and austere in implementation (as opposed to the chrome-heavy stuff we currently have). Hopefully this can help to build a campus culture for hex and counter style wargames, too.
• Merchant of Venus is a reimplementation of the classic Avalon Hill game by Richard Hamblen. It's a whimsical sci-fi economic game similar to Firefly, but with heavier emphasis on shipping different kinds of goods around the map. Like all Hamblen games it's quite mechanically baroqe and crunchy on the simulation level, like a version of Monopoly written by 80s-era TSR employees. ("Roll on the Vermin Infestation table to see how many rats are raiding your hotel this turn, and all their colors and ages.") It also has a second version of the rules (the "Standard Game"), which is revised for more modern sensibilities.