Moving onto a new job and thereby no longer in regular contact with that now-former coworker, I still often thought about Attack Wing. It’s a game of plotting tactical decisions, enacting those decisions, and then rueing your poor choices. Still, I was spellbound by the mechanics of Attack Wing. Star Trek is one of those franchises I’ve always enjoyed, but I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve never really deeply engaged with beyond a few random TV episodes and some of the movies. I arrived at Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game in a roundabout fashion, actually playing the rival Star Trek version of the game ( Attack Wing) with a coworker who introduced me over office lunch breaks. If you don’t move a TIE Fighter around the board without the requisite roar, I don’t know if there’s much that can be done to fix you. The Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game has all that, plus all the spaceships any kid growing up with the Star Wars franchise has been enchanted by thanks to their inspired design. You have to get down on their level to measure distances and lines of sight. It’s something about the tactile nature of miniatures games that gets to me. A foreshadowing of my eventual flirtation with Warhammer 40K. I wrote rules for a tactics game using those little army men, and the peaceful New England town represented on that table became a warzone. Looking back, that train table was pretty impressive, featuring multiple model buildings built for me by my woodworker grandfather, a forest of trees, bright working lampposts, railroad equipment galore, and much more. Miniatures games have always been a dangerous weakness of mine, reaching far back to when, as a kid, I placed my little green army men on our big train table. I’ve been doing a lot of fussing over the Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game, a game where you place little Star Wars spaceships on the table and “fly” them around trying to shoot down your opponent. Moving back to the physical realm, the board game that has been grabbing my overstretched imagination over the last year perhaps isn’t technically a board game. I asked BGA if a feature could be added where you can opt out of public games, making it so games could only be initiated by people on your friends list. The problem was, however, that my kid kept getting random game requests from strangers even in the brief moments between games, which also initiates a chat function with that stranger as you might imagine, that’s not something I was cool with. Plus, as always, getting people together is never easy, even now when people’s schedules are more open than usual.Ī shout-out to Board Game Arena: my kid has been playing games of chess, checkers, and the like on the platform with his grandfather, which has been an absolute life-saver in the afternoons when there’s no online school and we parents still have to work. The problem with those platforms is that their catalog of available games is very limited and often require players to have a prior, intimate knowledge of the game rules. One day that’ll return.ĭigital platforms like Board Game Arena and Tabletop Simulator have been ok substitutes, scratching the itch for the short term. I enjoy thunking pieces down in triumph, sorting my resources into neat rows, staring in terror at the cards I’ve been dealt, and so forth. The social part, of course, where we get together with friends to have drinks and a good dinner, but also just the tactile aspect of board gaming.
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