Paths of Glory

Ted Racier's World War I wargame, Paths of Glory is probably my favorite game right now.

It was published in 1999, but I only heard about it when I got back into boardgaming about a year ago. I purchased it and got my wargaming friend (Lionel) to try it. He liked it, but due to our schedules playing an 8+ hour game seemed impossible.

And then I found out that it had a VASSAL module. We had played VASL (the ASL precursor to VASSAL) before, and it was great for either real-time games or (woo!) play-by-email games. And so we commenced the Great War.

(You can see the report of our first turn here. And the second turn here. Alas - no third turn report yet. Also, no third turn! Lionel has gotten unavoidably busy and the time between responses has gotten longer and longer. And now it's been a couple of months - so I thing that particular war is enjoying a permanent armistice.

But there is new hope! I got myself put on the VASSAL players Geeklist at Board Game Geek, and soon enough was approached by Alex who had just purchased PoG. Would I be willing to teach him via VASSAL PBEM?

Heck yeah! We started a game last Thursday (9/20/07), and we just started into turn 2 today! Alex is great, and even though I'm supposedly teaching him he's doing very well... Actually kind of kicking my ass down in Austria-Hungary at the moment. (He's the Allies, I'm the Central Powers...)

Watch for a session report coming soon.

Meanwhile, with my regular gaming group (Lionel, Rich, Mat, Will, Patrice), we're still struggling to get everyone together to finish Spirit of the Century characters. I was hoping to do it yesterday, but illness was my excuse this time - I stayed home and recuped whilst watching Atlantis and Torchwood.

I hope to get enough done before TroyCon that I can run a session of it... but it's not looking good. (What is TroyCon? Well, it happens October 21st, and details will follow!)

Spirit of the Century

After talking about it for several weeks, we've finally got a couple characters started for SotC!

(If you're not familiar with this fascinating RPG, you can check it out here.)

It's designed as a "pickup game", for when life interferes with your regular game session. And our GM couldn't make it last night, so we four players were going to sit down to make characters (with me being the GM.) Ironically, one of the players (Rich) had car trouble and couldn't make it!

At least Lionel and Patrice were able to get started on their characters - we didn't finish, as they were the two with only a vague idea of their character concepts. Since Rich has 5 or 6 concepts already fleshed out, it should work pretty well the next time we all get together to finish up...

More later.