April 2013 Game Night

Last night our club got together for our monthly game night. I played in Ralph's Swashbuckler game that we play tested earlier in the week. With a full compliment of eight players the game was even more fun. At points players were standing among piles of thrown chairs, beaten repeatedly with thrown mugs and spatoons and we had a few good old fashioned run throughs with the sabre. We switched characters between games but d'Artagnan seemed to be in the middle of the trouble every game. One game he ran through one of the Cardinal's guards in one running lunge, another game he got that favor returned. In the final game he was among the fray in a hail storm of flying furniture and glassware.

Playing this game reminded me how much fun we had with the original board game back in the 80s. I'm excited about it enough I'm seriously considering doing something similar by adapting the rules for Samurai warfare. During playing of the game and the play test I thought I remembered someone from our club doing this back in the 80s but when I looked up the rules he used, Samurai Blades, it wasn't a Yaquinto game. I'll have to pick his brain about what he did next time I see him.

The other game last night was Phil's WWII Air Combat game using the new beautiful Axis & Allies Angels 20 pre-painted planes and rules. Phil's scenario was centered around the Cactus Air Force's missions from Henderson field and included scratch built islands and used Axis & Allies War at Sea ships. With the ships and islands at a smaller scale than the planes the game had a 'birds eye view' look that I think worked quite well. The Japanese were able to bomb Henderson field but the Americans insured that they didn't return their planes to the Emperor for re-use.