Boardgames, old and new

Although I don't play them as often as I might, I'm still deeply interested in boardgames. The surprising announcement that Fantasy Flight Games was releasing a new edition of the Netrunner collectable card game as one of their limited card games, where each package of cards has exactly the same contents was just the beginning. They're re-theming the game to their Android world, and titling it as , and dribbled information out to old and new fans of the game slowly in a lead-up to GenCon, where they were astounded to sell out of the game within ten minutes of the exhibitor hall opening. Things got rather heated on the boardgamegeek forums about that situation, but honestly, if you'ld offered me 2:1 odds on betting if Netrunner would sell out a decade after it had originally appeared, I'd have taken the 'no' bet and considered it certain money.

So, now I'm excitingly waiting for the game to come out so I can play it again. I've still got a pile of the old cards upstairs, but I think the new format will fit my free time better. As such, I've resurrected my old Denver City Grid fanpage from a decade ago. Drop me a line if you're local and want to play.

With that in mind, it was interesting to get a box of games from home, containing a number of boardgames from the 80's, when my brother collected them. Wabbit Wampage and Wabbit's Wevenge are almost more light wargames than anything I'm likely to play these days. Elfquest is an interesting tile based game involving elves searching for their original home while the trolls are trying to seal it away, although it looks like a kid or dog managed to chew on one of the tiles. Finally, there's a copy of Nuclear War, the original satiric game of blowing up the world in order to save it. They're all old style games, created a few decades before German games invaded, and it'll be interesting to see how much I end up playing them.