As DaveTheGame said to me on twitter: “There’s only a finite amount of roleplaying in the world, and it’s all being used elsewhere.”

Thanks, Dave!

So, instead I’m hoping for some boardgaming and a little Magic: the Gathering.

Horrific Hordes, the latest expansion to BattleLore arrived on my doorstep this week, and for the very first time I needed to glue together BattleLore figures. During Days of Wonder’s stewardship of the game, they always came pre-glued. Not with Fantasy Flight Games. To be fair, BL is a tremendously expensive product to produce. (It’s so expensive, they’re not sure if they’ll be able to reprint the base game. Well, they’re not reprinting it… will they have a base BL game ever again?) So, I spent half-an-hour glueing pieces together or thereabouts, getting high on plastic glue. Ahem.

The set allows me to field a fully goblin army. In a very nice touch, the Call to Arms deployment cards have been expanded with quite a few more cards to allow goblin deployment (as well as clearing up some creature deployment issues as well). There are also five scenarios in the pack, of which one requires you to have the previous two Goblin packs (which I do), and one that isn’t a scenario as such but rather a set-up for the Call to Arms system.

The scenarios deal with the Spanish driving the Moors out of Spain, with the Moors being recast as Goblins. The five scenarios tell a story of sorts, and look quite enjoyable, especially the fourth which has a *lot* of units on the board. Lots and lots of goblins, which is why you need to previous goblin packs to run it. Or a lot of proxies.

BattleLore suffers from the number of different sculpts it has; it makes the game far more expensive than (say) Memoir ’44. Unfortunately, it also lacks scenarios. A standard M44 expansion comes with 8 scenarios; this one only comes with 4 and a half. The Call To Arms system doesn’t make up for the lack of designed scenarios.

So, come the weekend I’ll be toting my copy of BattleLore into Good Games and seeing if anyone is willing to play.

Tonight, I’m hoping to get a game of SPQR in with Randy. Well, half-a-game would be nice. The battle we’ll be playing – the Battle of the Trebbia River – is a really big one, where Hannibal is expected to make mincemeat of my poor, wet, hungry and demoralised Romans. The play notes say it can be played at “a sitting”, which in SPQR-speak translates to about 6 hours. At least, I think that’s what it means. It might be over a lot faster.

SPQR isn’t much to look at. It’s a traditional hex’n’counter game from Mark Herman, Richard Berg and the folks at GMT Games. However, there is a lot of it – possibly close to 100 scenarios at this point of time – and someone had the bright idea of linking all of the Second Punic War scenarios into a campaign in a recent issue of C3i magazine. So, Randy and I are playing through that campaign on an on-and-off basis. More off than on, though: this is our only the third battle in the campaign, which we started last year!

SPQR is, on the other hand, a lot of fun. It’s just time-consuming, which is a key reason we hadn’t gotten back to it.

Otherwise, I’m hoping to finally get a chance to play Steam Barons, the share-market version of Steam, by Martin Wallace. I’ve been carrying it around to several game days recently, but the right opportunity has never presented itself. It can possibly be described as 18XX light, which is good. I own one of the 18XX rail share games (1856), but I’m yet to play a full game, mainly because a full game is like a sitting of SPQR: quite long. And probably a lot more confusing.