Why did I get my new laptop?

I’ve now been in possession of my new laptop for a few months and, it seems, one of the primary reasons I bought it was to watch DVDs on it rather than on my television set. Hmm. It’s not like I’m doing this in a different room than the TV – it’s right there – but having a widescreen on the laptop does make some difference. I think it’s also slightly better on how much power it uses.

The other main reason I got my laptop was apparently to finish writing the MechMaker program – a program that allows the user to create and print BattleMechs using the Introductory and Sword & Dragon rules. It’s working quite nicely at present, although I haven’t yet added the feature to split a couple of weapons between two crit locations. That hasn’t really been necessary, though. I’ve made a slight change to the Total Warfare blank sheet I print it on: Quantity of weapons is no longer a heading. I found “2 Medium Lasers” was too easy to misread as just a single laser. An entry per line works fine and I’ve yet to have a Mech’s armament that doesn’t fit.

Tonight I’m going to Good Games Ballarat, as I’ve been doing every Thursday night whilst Randy is rehearsing, and I’ll oversee the latest game in their BattleTech/Sword & Dragon campaign. Should be fun. Derek and Sara have gone and really upgraded their few remaining Mechs. The two Grasshoppers they are running have Endo Steel internal structure to save a few tons, which they’ve used to add a couple of prototype Double Heat Sinks and an extra Medium laser. Very, very scary mechs. They’re up against 5 Light mechs tonight so it should be an easy win to the Sabres. It’s just a case of how much damage the opposition will do.

I spent last Sunday afternoon getting a few of the kids (Jayden, Jackson and Liam) addicted to BattleTech. I hope that when I get in there this afternoon, one of them will have bought the last Introductory Box Set. I also hope that Catalyst will get the 25th anniversary set out sometime real soon – I need more minis!

Oh, I finally painted a couple of minis under Mick’s direction on Sunday – a few of my BattleLore figures. Eventually, I’ll work my way up to BattleTech, but I started on the little BattleLore (20mm) figures because they’ll look good painted and I want a second set of BTech figures before I start painting them.

I’ve been playing BattleLore with Nash, who is rather impressed by the game. We’re working our way through the Hundred Year War scenarios at present, and we had two fantastic games last Saturday. I won both by a single banner, but they could have gone either way.

New acquisitions include two new BattleTech books: Masters and Minions (which is a background supplement mainly for the RPG) and the 25th Anniversary Art & Fiction book, which is very nice indeed. On the wargaming side, I’ve got the GMT block game of Hellenes, which I really hope I’ll get a game of soon, and MMP’s PanzerBlitz. That last was due to OPSI#2 – it had an expansion for PB, so I had to get the basic game. I’m a sucker that way. (Especially as Randy isn’t too fond of the original). It looks like lighthearted fun.

For the Eurogamers, I’ve picked up Endeavour, which Randy, Rich, Jesse, Josh and myself played on the weekend. This is a really, really good game. I was unsure when I first looked at the game, but it plays beautifully. There was a lot of strategy that we didn’t quite understand when we started (our initial building draws were pretty poor), but the game really came together as we continued through the game. It looks to have a lot of replayability, and is brilliant with five players. The theme adds a nice little fillip to the play of the game. It has resonances with Age of Empires 3, but it’s very much its own game.

Randy had picked up The BoardGameGeek Game, and that was a great amount of fun. It uses dice to provide positioning each turn, but there’s actually not that much luck in the game. As it turned out, I won the BGG game and Randy won Endeavour.