Any Board Gamers Playing Takamo?

[Cestodial Hegemony]

Thom mentioned a board game (Merchant of Venus) in another thread. Do any of you Takamoids enjoy board games?

Below is a link to my user profile on BoardGameGeek...
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/user/Aglar

[Cyvelius]

A former co-worker of mine introduced me and the bunch of us to gameboardgeek years ago along with games like Puerto Rico, Age of Mythology, Magna Grecia, Thurn an d Taxis, Settlers of Catan, Spacefarers of Catan, Carcasone (went there with the game), Java, Civilization, and on and on... love 'em. I've been watching the TV series Hell on Wheels on Netflix recently and it's giving me an urge to play Railroad Tycoon (the board game, of course). Our house rule is that if the board is a map no women can play!

[Knights Of Rancor]

I too like board games Settlers of Catan, Carcassonne Hunters and Gatherers, Risk (the original and the LotR versions)and others.

[Cestodial Hegemony]

Cyvelius and Knights Of Rancor,
If you do not mind my asking...what are your user profile names on BoardGameGeek? I am curious to see your ratings of games (assuming you have rated games).
My profile name is "Aglar".

[Cyvelius]

If I ever had one before I've since forgotten, but I just registered as gstafford8.

[Trader_Phred]

Started out age 14 playing PanzerBlitz and France 1940.

I used to have a copy of SPI's monster game War in the Pacific that had nine regular-sized wargame hex maps, and I'm not even going to try to guess how many counters (besides "a heck of a lot"). Talked to a gaming buddy who actually played it as a member of a group, he said it took almost as long to play as it did to fight the real war.

I have a couple of old favorites, Victory Games' NATO, SPI's Swords and Sorcery and Lord of the Rings.

If you haven't read Greg Costikyan's A Farewell To Hexes, you should.

[Cyvelius]

Good stuff. I think I fell into the category of players who tried picking up super complicated wargames and got blown away. When I was in high school my cousin introduced me to some, and several years later after I had graduated college I tried getting into it by picking up a copy of Advanced Squad Leader. It was a combo pack with the Eastern Front (I think) expansion. Well, after studying those rules hard, I couldn't crack them. Around the same time I did pick up a West End game called St. Lo. That was a good one, and I managed to play that with a couple of other brainiac fellow computer programmer friends of mine. But that was definitely well into the waning days of the genre, late 80s. In my case computer games did start to grab me more. Being a computer geek it was a natural.

One interesting company that actually got started in that era of the late seventies and has grown and still thrives should be noted. Games Workshop, with their Warhammer and Warhammer 40k and other games have bucked not just the wargame trend, but also the model building trend. There's loads of GW critics, and I've been one, but you have to hand it to them for carving out a successful business in the face of the complete opposite trend. Try finding a kid who builds plastic models these days, or try finding a kit on the shelf of a store. Kudos to Hobby Lobby, BTW, for still stocking plastic model kits!!!

Kind of funny about D&D too. Despite the low tech pen and paper thing i the face of video/computer games, they've managed to hang in there too. Interesting that the author tags TSR for the demise of wargames. I never knew that. Of course, that was TSR under the original regime, I suppose.

Fun stuff...

[Trader_Phred]

Yeah, Advanced Squad Leader got way out of hand after a while there.

I read in Greg Costikyan's article, "A Farewell to Hexes" (if you haven't read it, do - all about how TSR screwed wargaming for good, for $$$) http://www.costik.com/spisins.html that it got so complex you could have taught college-level classes in how to play it. Another thing I heard (rumor central, natch) was that the US Army actually DID use it to teach tactics to up and coming combat sergeants and junior officers.

The wonderful thing about a lot of the games from back then was that you could play them at a basic level, or else start adding in the optional rules and make it as much more complex as you liked. I also learned that I probably wasn't going to make it as an army officer, but that changed right around "colonel"... .

I would, however, make a damn good admiral.

[Tregonsee]

I read the article, and comparing to my own history, while those companies had problems, they also had competition. Role playing games sucked a lot of gaming potential, as did computer games. Now it is a competition for everything (internet, Takamo, etc). I have more time now for boardgames, but no one to play them with. Vassal supposedly takes care of some of that issue, but I don't know how to use Vassal.

Heck, I would even have fun playing that ultimate 'beer and pretzels' game, Axis and Allies (2nd edition). But it is just no fun playing the game yourself.

I do have Avalon Hill and SPI games in forgotten corners of the house...

[Knights Of Rancor]

For the really early stuff like Axis and Allies, I started with 2 my brother in law got for Christmas back in 1973 or 74 (I was playing D&D at the time) or tried to anyway, we couldn’t get a handle on them at the time they were 1776 and Third Reich. I read the rules over and over and didn’t get it (by my self ). I was trying to figure them out for my brother in law who was only 16 at the time. I ended up going to Hobby Town (when it was still a little shop in the Stewart Building in Lincoln) and getting help. They steered me to Tactics II witch was a big help. Then I bought Battle of the 5 Armies (based on the Hobbit battle) I ended up making a 3D board and buying Lead minis for it that’s about the time I met Thom at the Great Race and Hobby Place. I still have Tactics II and I sold the original Battle of the 5 Armies a few yr back for about 10 times what I paid for it (wish I still had it) I started playing Takamo when our D&D group started to break up with players moving away.