Board Games

So, it seems that I am a board game geek. Currently, my favorite game right now is Heroscape. It's really COOL! When I was little, I used to play with GI Joe's and Transformers and line them up and make them have battles. I'd create battlefields in the living room. There'd be water areas for the boats, a snow area for the snowmobile, a good guy base and a bad guy base, and I'd set up all the guys in their appropriate spots. And then Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes would clobber everyone else, until it was only the 2 of them left to have their final epic ninja battle. Well, Heroscape is kind of like that, except with rules! Oh why didn't they have Heroscape when I was young? You can have a team made up of WWII soldiers, ninjas, and robots fighting against a team of knights, gorillas, and Charlie's Angels. And the best part is that you can create your own custom battlefields that look really great.

I like a bunch of the Days of Wonder games right now. One of our favorites is Shadows Over Camelot. It's fun because it's a cooperative game. Kind of nice being able to be on the same team with everyone. But it's hard though. We haven't won yet (came close though!). I also like Battlelore, although I haven't had as much opportunity to play as I'd like. Mystery of the Abbey is another good one. Kind of like Clue, but much better I think.

But the one game that I really want to get right now is Tide of Iron. Oh it looks so fun. I've actually already read the instruction manual even though I don't own the game. Tide of Iron is kind of like playing with army men, but with rules about what to do with them. And it looks like you get a really good tactical simulation that has enough detail to make it realistic, but not too much detail to make it boring. It comes with tanks and half tracks and army guys and all sorts of plasticy goodness.

Oh, one other game that I like is War of the Ring. It's a Lord of the Rings game that recreates the whole epic struggle between the good guys and bad guys of Middle Earth. The map is nice and huge. And there are all sorts of little Middle Earth army guys that go on it. The good guys job is to destroy the ring. The Fellowship starts out together protecting the ringbearer from corruption. This is good, but eventually, they will need to split apart in order to gather the various armies together to battle against Sauron's forces. The bad guys job is to take over all of the good guys' cities. They have much many more resources than the good guys so their forces are a bit overwhelming. However, they can't just spend all of their resources seiging and pillaging and marauding. They need to find the ring! So both sides have actions that they need to balance. There are cards for all of the different characters in the stories that have various effects. We've only played one time (and it was only the introductory rules). But what we saw, we liked a lot. Because Lord of the Rings is the BEST!