Chadwick and Butterfield FTW

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Bloody Kasserine, Race for Tunis, Ambush all arrived on Thursday from a forum purchase. They are all in pretty good physical shape, the boxes bearing the brunt of the wear, as usual. Over the last couple of days, I've spent some time to clean up the counters by trimming and clipping. They look great!

Bloody Kasserine and Race for Tunis are GDW Frank Chadwick games, featuring simple rules, reasonably low counter density (176 counters in each game), and relatively short playing time, which I'm estimating about 3 hours for experienced players. Kasserine was an impulse purchase. It turns out Race for Tunis can attach to form a larger campaign game, and the seller discounted for buying both.

Ambush is the Victory Game's Butterfield solitaire tactical game, which has an excellent reputation. I've wanted it for a while. The seller for Kasserine just happened to have this for sale as well, and I couldn't resist it.

What's even cooler is that each of these games is open and punched. That's cool because I tend not to open games which are in shrink. I have plenty of "opened" games it just seems wasteful to tear the shrink off a game unless I'm ready to play it immediately.

The downside of buying used games is I feel compelled to inventory the game immediately, and trim and corner the counters. This is mindless work to be sure, but I'm thinking I ought to find a way to limit the corner rounding to say, work day evenings.

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What to play next?

Deciding what to play next is always a tough call when faced with a closet full of games, all of which were purchased with intent to play. Here's one I'm dealing with the decision.

  • Something New: this means both something new to me and a game which has been published recently, within the last two or three years.
  • Something Classic: I've acquired a number of games properly considered "classic" which haven't yet been played. The current example would be PanzerGruppe Guderian.
  • Something Again: mastery requires constant practice, which means playing games many, many times to allow nuance to appear.
  • Something Vietnam: as I'm on a Vietnam binge. I don't have all the Vietnam games ever published, but I can say that I have a lot of them, and probably more than most people.
  • Something Obscure: as it's fun to poke around in the dustier corners of game design.
  • Something Different: break away from the same old publishers and try a game from one of the new kids on the block. Or, conversely, dip into legacy with a classic tried and true.
  • Something Light: once in a while it's nice to actually finish a game all the way through in one sitting, in an hour or two.
  • Something Heavy: if possible, it's nice to set up something big and complicated which can be left out for days or weeks or even months, for a leisurely stroll through a very large or long game.

There are surely many more ways to choose, but the above method keeps me busy enough, helps me get both breadth and depth into my play, and provides me with a sense of progress.

The odd man out

When there is an odd man out:

  • Have a solo game ready to play.
  • Keep score or advise on a game in progress.
  • Referee a game in progress.