State of play ...

I thought I'd put together a post about where I am in the hobby world right now. Hopefully, this will give you an idea of what sort of things will be coming in the future on this blog.

So where am I? It's a bloody good question to be honest. I suppose you could say I've reverted back to my first days of gaming. I'm playing simpler games now and I'm enjoying gaming a lot more.

Don't get me wrong, I love 40k but it's a hell of a lot of hard work. It's expensive, time consuming, mentally fatiguing at times and to be perfectly honest, it's had a dedicated decade of my hobby life all to itself. So the time has come to put it aside for a while. I doubt it'll be aside for long as I'm still buying white dwarf and I do love my guard but I'll only be dabbling in it occasionally. There's more important hobby activities to be pursued right now. Saying all that, I do have a mate who's itching to get back into 40k, so in typical Corbania Prime style, who knows!

On the actual gaming front, I'm seriously getting into Saga.

Saga is a dark age skirmish game based in Europe in the time leading up to the battle of Hastings. It's a really simple game to learn, has a relatively low model count and the lack of 'superpowers' so to speak means it's more tactically challenging. The games mechanics work really well with all your actions (unit movement, shooting, combat) being based of the availability of certain symbol from a pool of symbolic dice. The amount of dice in that pool depends on the amount of units you have at that point and so decrease with your army's losses. Finally, each faction has a unique set of abilities that can be activated by certain dice or combination of dice. The welsh have skirmish, ambush and archers abilities, my Normans have cavalry and archery based abilities. This combined with the simple fast game play (we played four games in three and a half hours) make it a genuine pleasure to play.

The other game in my hobby life is Heroquest. Or should I say, our own modified version of Heroquest. I've been working with little man to come up with a simple rule set for playing a very basic dungeon adventure game. I've found by coming up with the rules organically as we play the game is really helping him understand and learn the rules bit by bit. So far, he's recruited his two cousins into his band of adventurers. We have his cousins for sleepovers quite a lot so there's plenty of hobby time.

In hobby time, I've found the added bonus to hobbying with your kids is that my wife is far more supportive of hobby activities and purchases! Oh the joy of children hey gents!

As a spin off, to make things more interesting for little man, we've been working on casting up a modular dungeon to play on. I'll blog more about that in a later blog, but it's a great activity for me as much as the kids.

So gents, that's the state of play in my hobby world. Any of you guys playing Saga or Heroquest? Or even casting up Hirst molds?

Col