Easter Weekend

What do I do on an Easter Weekend? I play games, of course!

Strangely, there were no RPGs involved at all. Indeed, the next few weeks will be very light for RPGs altogether – Martin & Peggy are going to be away (in various places) for the next few Fridays, which knocks out Star Wars and D&D – Savage Tide. Meanwhile, come this Sunday, I’ll be wrapping up my D&D 3.5e Ulek campaign. We’ve pretty much done everything I wanted to do with that campaign. Well, within the capabilities of my adventure-writing imagination, that is. (There are things I would have liked to do, but I couldn’t write the right adventure for them). So, instead of just letting it limp along until 4e comes out, we’ll go out in a blaze of glory this Sunday.

At least, I hope it’ll be a blaze of glory.

I’ve reached the point of really wanting 4e to come along. I enjoy 3.5e, I really do, but there are elements of the system – in particular how it fails to handle the mathematics behind high-level play – that have become wearying. Not handling high-level play is a feature of all editions of D&D, of course, it’s just that 3.5e managed to fail to handle it in a spectacular fashion whilst looking like it should work.

So, 60+ hardcover books of 3e are about to become (mostly) obsolete. Oh well, I definitely got a lot of use out of them. They can now sit on my shelves as old friends that I don’t see any more.

What I did play on the weekend were a lot of boardgames: face to face, solo and via computer. Consider this list:

Friday:
* Stand at Mortain
* Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage
* Combat Commander: Europe
* Thebes
* Louis XVI

Saturday:
* Vegas Showdown
* Thebes
* In the Year of the Dragon
* Talisman
* Cuba
* Perikles
* Last Night on Earth

Sunday:
* Runebound (x3) – solo
* Power Grid – on brettspielwelt.de

Monday:
* Runebound (x2) – solo
* The Settlers of Catan – on brettspielwelt.de
* Power Grid – on brettspielwelt.de
* San Juan – on brettspielwelt.de
* Carcassonne (x2) – on brettspielwelt.de

All a lot of fun. www.brettspielwelt.de is a German boardgame site that allows play online against other players. I really enjoy being able to play these games from home… as it’s quite some distance to me to my friends.

I’ve been writing up on www.boardgamegeek.com session reports for most of the games, although they’re likely to take a day or two to complete. The games have mostly been a lot of fun (in some cases, merely fun ). Getting pounded by Randy in Twilight Struggle is sadly become an all-to-familiar occurrence. I guess we can add getting pounded by Randy in Hannibal: Rome vs Carthage to that list all too soon! They’re really good games, though, and a good expenditure of two hours or so.