One thing we missed in our time in New York was not having friends who shared our same interest in board games and staying up until the wee hours conversing about everything and nothing. As much as we enjoy a good game, often the game seems to be only a conduit we use as an excuse to spend the time together. When we lived in South Carolina, we had a number of couples who shared our interest in games (both video and board), and many of the guys also shared my interest in miniatures: something I have yet to delve into much. We are blessed to have found another family with whom we have been able to share those mutual late night game sessions again. Our children are the same ages, so it is a very good fit when we crash at one or the other of our houses for a “quick game” that often lasts well into the night.

Most recently, we have been playing Carcassonne and The Settlers of Catan at some length. I actually purchased the Carcassonne Big Box set with a handful of expansions from a friend before we made our move away from SC, but although we had heard great things about Settlers, we had never actually played it until a couple weeks ago. We broke open a new box, and I am happy to say that so far, with the four of us playing, I have a 3/4 winning streak.

Now, without going into a lot of detail, suffice to say that we have always enjoyed a good board game. I am the type who must have a measure of strategy involved. Simply leaving your fate completely up to a roll of the dice is not much of a game to me, so I have thoroughly enjoyed playing these games, among others, with our friends. I may write about various games from time to time, if there is a specific one that comes to my attention or strikes me as supremely well made, but this is not intended to be one of those posts to review a specific game. Instead, I just wanted to take a moment and write about the entertainment quality of a good friend and a good game.

On the flip side of board gaming, I have been very interested in miniatures as well: from having over 200 individual HeroScape unit cards at one point to buying my starter pack for Dream Blade and playing multiple rounds on lunch break at one of my past jobs (no, there is no correlation to the game playing and it being a past job), I have really enjoyed the ideas of real time combat. Fully customizable armies like those offered in larger scale miniature systems like Warhammer or War Machine have been a huge interest to me as well.

I have always had a soft spot for customization and painting, so the idea of being able to manipulate some of the characters into custom poses as well as fully custom paint troops or an entire army fascinates me. During a somewhat recent trip to the mall, I stuck my head into a Games Workshop store and spent a good length of time discussing the ins and outs of the hobby with one of the workers there, and he gave me a Legolas character piece from the Lord of the Rings tabletop battle system along with an issue of White Dwarf. Now, that is something that really interested me: being able to build an entire army of custom painted creatures from Middle earth to combat the forces of Mordor.

As interesting and fascinating as this all is, and as much as I would enjoy getting into the hobby (especially with the ability to recreate battle sequences and capture them with my new camera) — ok, yes, I’ll admit I’m a geek — the purchase price of the models themselves is probably enough to set me back a few years until the kids are old enough to play and make it worth the price to get into something that involved. In the meantime, if anyone wants to send me a starter set for Warhammer, Warhammer 40K or any other miniatures sets, I’m sure I would find a way to oblige!