The games I play
I have been playing games of one sort or another for as long as I can remember. As a child my family played board games during our long, wet summer holidays in Wales and Cornwall. As a teenager I discovered wargames and then the new hobby of board wargames. In the late Seventies I transferred my affections to role-playing games and postal games, combining the two with the start of my postal En Garde! game, Les Petites Bętes Soyeuses, in 1986.
The discovery of the wealth of high quality, strategy board games published in Europe – and particularly Germany – brought me full circle back to board games by 1990. Since then I have discovered the joys of ‘freeform’ role-playing (live role-playing, with players in costume – something like a drama improvisation coupled with a murder-mystery party game).
On the front page I mentioned that I don’t play computer games. Here’s why not. As far as I can see computer games are puzzles. Players are trying to find the ways to solve the puzzle that have been built in by the designer(s). (What they are not doing is competing or co-operating with other people within a framework of rules. That is, playing a game.) And I don’t like puzzles. Either I can do them easily, in which case they’re boring. Or I can't do them easily, so they’re frustrating and boring. Either way, I’m not interested. Show me a game that uses the medium of the computer and I’ll be interested.
Nowadays I am most likely to be playing a recently-published board game of UK, European or US origin – my reviews will give you some idea of the things I play and enjoy. You can find me playing these most Wednesdays at Swiggers games club.
I remain a big fan of the swashbuckling role-playing game, En Garde (I now own the rights to the game!), and run a number of postal games. Alongside all this are occasional role-playing sessions and attendance at weekend-long freeform games. The most recent game was Once Upon a Time in Tombstone over the weekend of 11th-13th November 2005: I'll be adding some photos when I get a chance. (Previous games were The Siege of Troy in Nov 2004, Torch of Freedom in Nov 2003 and Café Casablanca in March 2000.)
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