Now as we all know board games can be a bit pricey. On the whole though when you pay £30 - £40 for a game you get a quality piece of kit. The art work of both the board and cards is excellent most times, playable pieces tend to be cast very well and quite detailed and any other items required by the game, be they metal, plastic or cardboard, are generally of very good quality. So when compared to the latest console games retailing at around £30 - £40 (and all you get in those is a disc!) a quality board game seems the better investment. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not slagging off consoles, I love my X-Box 360, much to my wife’s chagrin! But for your money you also get the social interaction that a console game cannot give you. Oh I know all about gaming on-line, but it cannot & will not ever compare with sitting face to face with your opponents in a battle of skill and wits. You can’t use body language or facial expressions over the net.
There is one area of the board game industry that I do not understand though, and it concerns the price of hard-core wargames. The games I’m talking about are generally set in the Pacific theatre of operations during WW2. They try to recreate battles such as Midway, Guadalcanal and the American island hopping campaigns. The boxes seem to consist of a large playing area coloured blue, with the occasional green island, and hundreds of quite cheap looking cardboard counters. Now these games can retail from £60 upwards! Go figure. I’m sure the manufacturer has some line about ‘authentic recreation of historical campaigns’, when in actual fact all they’ve sold you for your £60+ is a piece of blue paper and a few cardboard counters with outlines of planes and ships. If any one who has played these games feel they are worth the cost then please respond.
GS.
Hi all. Now this is not a blog per-se, but I thought a short note would not go amiss.
Congratulations to our illustrious webmaster and UG co-founder, Stuart, & his wife Michelle on the birth of their baby daughter Matilda. That’s three and counting!
One way to increase club membership I supppose!
A few days before the big event kicks-off, the UK Games Expo in Birmingham (http://www.ukgamesexpo.co.uk/), and I write with sadness in two ways, the first is the fact that I will not be able to be there and secondly because this seems to be the only big board gaming conference in the UK (some exceptions are ManorCon in Leicester (http://www.manorcon.org.uk/) and SorCon in Colchester (http://www.sorcon.co.uk/)) and I am missing it! I realise board gaming in the UK is a sad world indeed when I go to the Yahoo Group for UK Board Game Conventions (http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/uk-con-news/) and there are only 5 posts for this year so far - hardly a kicking place to be.
I think a future Underground Gamers day out, or weekend away, must be to a board gaming convention however if we want to go to the UK (which is the only practical option in terms of cost), the choice is very very limited. Now when I look to mainland Europe and overseas my mouth starts to water!
Germany has Essen (the Board Gamers Mecca), the US has Origins and the Steve Jackson Gaming Convention (http://www.sjgames.com/con/) and many, many others. This inequality forces a question into my mind - why is it when we have many people in the UK who enjoy board gaming (evidenced by the growing number of groups like Underground Gamers) that we have so few times when we get together. If we were into caravanning, for example, we would have association meetings every month!
Perhaps you know of a good UK board gaming event that I haven’t found yet - if so, cheer me up and let me know….
Even though I hoped it wouldn’t, I guessed that it would happen - introduce a club league table for the very right reason (so that we can identify an end of year club champion) and it starts to get very confusing.
First the scoring – what should we record? 1st place only;1st and 2nd; 1st, 2nd and 3rd or 1st, 2nd, 3rd and everyone else who took part? After much debate we chose the latter!
Then the recording of the scores during the sessions - the ‘voice of reason’ Scott does this and does a great job, but it can’t be too much fun for him to have the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and who took part hollered at him to note down while he is trying to focus on the game he is playing!
Finally comes the updating onto the website. To do this Scott emails me the latest scores for totting up against the last league table and uploading onto the site – when this data is pulled together on a person by person basis (eg. for that session Colin gained an additional 7 points) it is not too hard.
So far so good.
However, when you throw against this some niggly detailed complications such as;
- How do we score a game that only has 1st place? (eg. no 2nd or 3rd)
- What happens when we have a tie for 1st or 2nd or 3rd place?
- How many points do we give for each 1st, 2nd or 3rd place or when someone takes part?
I think most of these have been unearthed and resolved now we are two scored sessions in – and it seems to be working a little better (apart from Scott ‘the scorer’ being ill for the last session and Mark deputised as scorer extraordinaire. As a result it took me (with Scott’s help) ages to work through the scores (provided on a game by game basis) and to sort out the league table!).
I don’t think there is a simpler way off doing this? Unless you know better….
Check out our league table at http://www.undergroundgamers.co.uk/results.htm