On Hiatus

No entries for a while. Up until last week, that was mostly because I hadn't gamed much during that time, maybe one or two Tuesday sessions. There's been quite a bit of gaming over the past week and a half, including the semi-annual Eurogaming retreat, but I really haven't had the energy to log the events (especially at Sunriver, where I seemed to be dragging even more than usual).

While I can blame Blogger's "hey, where'd it go?!?!" interface (worse in Safari on a Mac) to some extent, the simple truth is that I've gotten a bit weary of the usual "played this, X won" format that most session reports entail. An excellent example:

"Dave and I pulled out Twilight Struggle as we had a few hours until the others were done playing and Mike wanted to blog and read his book. Dave took the US, as he'd had an excellent record with the USSR against Chuck and wanted to see if it was the Russians that were so good or him. We never really got the chance to see. Things were about even in the first couple of turns, although I was working more on position than points, and so Dave had a slight advantage due to a two space lead in the the Space Race. His attempts to slow me down via a Red Purge in turn 2 didn't really work out like he'd hoped, as I played almost entirely events in that turn, with two wars to get my mil ops up, take Viet Nam, Nasser, etc. What killed him, however, was drawing all three scoring cards on the third turn, even with yet another Purge played on me. Since I was leading in all three areas, he quickly figured out that I was going to gain 23 points with those three scoring cards and win the game no matter what I played (which was true, I could Space Race and play unimpressive US OPS cards). As such, I have renamed this game "Toilet Struggle" as that's where my opinion has settled after seven games with crazy card distributions. A multi-hour game whose outcome rests on who gets what cards when (as has happened in every game since our first one, where we played the wrong domination rules") is not one I will choose to pull out. A shame really, as there is great story in this game and to leave such a massive flaw in place strikes me as bordering on fraudulent by the developer and publisher."

While that may seem like a lot of info in a small space, in truth I've written it before for other sessions with the same game. "The game is flawed, this happened on this turn, I won." In other words, it's been done, and more than once. There is some room for creativity in writing good reviews, but in general I'm loathe to express an opinion quite so publicly and officially as a "review" rather than an "impression" without multiple plays, and there are very few games that get multiple plays in our group.

As such, I'm going to put this particular blog on hiatus for a while. I'm strongly considering blogs on other topics, such as music, and possible along the lines of Gathering of Engineers, although such blogs tend to veer out of control of the creator and die after a few months if not weeks. For now, I'm going to leave off blogging entirely and see how I feel in a few months.

Thanks for all of your interest, for those of you who were not part of Rip City Gamers, and thus uninterested parties, and also for those of you who have made gaming such a rewarding hobby for me. I'm not quitting gaming, just blogging, so don't get too hopeful, erm, worried.

I will post an update or two in the coming months on what I decide to do, so please keep an RSS link to this site if where I go from here interests you, and God knows why it would.

Doug