Game Night

An article by Don Quixote

I had a chance to play again with Mark’s (Network security guy from the college) gaming group on Friday night. His buddies Paul & Brian showed up and Paul for personal reaons (his wife was sick or at least sick of the kids) brought his two children. The game on the table was the Avalon Hill classic – Age of Renaissance.

This is the second time that I’ve played this game and I’m convinced that underneath it all it’s a good game. I’m not a fan of lots of fiddly actions and pieces, and AoR certainly has quite a few. I’m also not a huge fan of games that take HOURS to play (we clocked in at 5 hours and we only played 2 of the 3 epocs). To top it all off, Paul brought his two kids and had his daughter play (who he helped along). Now, I don’t mind playing board games with kids – when Gordon (www.fortwayne.com) comes he’ll often bring his kids to game night (which is totally fine, its open to everyone) and I n’t mind when Rachel plays because normally it’s a lighter game and I have no investment in (for exaple Coloretto or something along those lines). But when I’m playing an intense (and I think 5 hours qualifies as that) game with 3 other guys all over 40, it’s frustrating to be playing with a 10 or 11 year old kid, who Dad is helping play along (giving him a slight advantage since he’s working two kingdoms). And the last little gripe about this, I was originally told this is more of a “guys” night thing so to have kids there and then to have an 11 girl play just rubbed me the wrong way. But other than that I had a good time. I always love the challenge, and I love playing games that I stink at or when the players are exceptional as it gives me a chance to really test my stuff. Not only that, for this being my second time playing (I scored a -7 last time), and through both games to be considered a threat is a good thing for the old ego.

The game ended up really close and despite having played before and all four of us reading the rules, we still managed to mess up quite a few (which is another reason I’m not a huge fan of war games and other games from Avalon Hill – you shouldn’t have to spend 20 minutes discussing the wording of a rule to know if something is legal or not.) Oh well, I look forward to Monday as this will be my night with my normal gaming group and it’ll be nice to have a more relaxed setting (my house). Not sure what we are playing, but it’ll be Euro games and we’ll get a few different ones in.

On a side note, I took the weekend off so it was totally weird to stay up until mid-night, let alone get home after 12:30. Then to top it all off, I actually didn’t have to get out of bed until almost 9:00 am. Can you believe it?! I forgot how good it feels. For the rest of you folks who live semi-normal lives, you have no idea how good you’ve got it.