Jason Orton Gets Baptized

An article by Don Quixote    No Comments

No, I’m not talking about into the faith, but rather into a cult following… a following of board gamers.

This past Friday (September 9th, 2005), I had the opportunity to host my good buddy and fellow blogger, Jason Orton (aka Hunter Killer).

I’ve known Jason for about 9 years now (via his brother Justin) and we’ve been friends ever since. I guess it started with video games (Age of Empires) and a similar sphere of friends and experience. He’s one of those friends that I don’t see more than once a year (and even then sometimes not even that), but we seem to pick up right back where we left and have a comfort to talk about anything. Easy going, good conversation, and good competition.

Jason is kind enough to read my blog and comment every once and awhile and all my yammering on and on about board games finally broke him down. So when he showed up and I asked him wanted he wanted to do with his time in the La Mancha Homestead, he said, “So show me what all this board game stuff is about it.”

Where to start? With so many options to choose from here was hard to know where to even begin.

So we started with something simple and a little bit abstract: Hive.

For you long time readers you know that Hive is one of my favorite two player games. It’s like chess only with more hexagons. Again, if you haven’t been there go to http://www.hivemania.com and check out the rules and play the online java version.

It took a few walk through games for Jason to get the hang of it, but by the time we were done he was seriously challenging my skills to keep him from taking the win. His biggest struggle is that he constantly attacks and has a difficult time pulling guys off to keep himself from getting hedged in. I gave him one of my extra copies so I am sure that he will be hitting you folks in Lansing up for a game sometime soon (that doesn’t include poor Justin who I am sure got a few games in while he was down visiting them).

From there we moved onto the game Metro (a classic tile laying game).

Jason had NO problem picking up on this game as he walked away with the win on this one. Yes I may have gone easy on him, but that still doesn’t take into account that he beat me by almost 40 points!

At this point I had to call in reinforcements.

I brought in Jon and Drew from work and Drew brought along his buddy Shrek (real name Ryan, but they’ve been calling him Shrek since the 1st grade, WAY before the movie came out).

Jason and I did a walk through game on Settlers of Catan to give him an overview of the father of all gaming.

He was hooked.

With the unexpected addition of Shrek, I decided to sit out the first game and went and got Jason’s favorite: Little Caesars Pizza.

The game drug on for hours with 3 new players and Jon, but in the end, 5 minutes before we were set to call the game, Jason pulled out the win.

I was pretty sure that Drew and Shrek would be on their way out and done with board gaming considering the length of the game and the shellacking they took (I think Shrek managed a total of 3 VPs). Heck no, the first thing they said, was, “Dude, we’ve got to play that again.”

And so we did. This time I took a few opportunities to assist Drew and Shrek in their settlement placement and we set off to playing. Sure enough they took to it like beans to gas and Shrek dominated the game. I gave him a run for his money, but there was no stopping this kid.

A good time was had by all.

Welcome to board gaming Jason!