May 2nd Game Day at Gameology AAR

We had a total of 9 members, just not all at once, and a late-afternoon cameo from Dave Kocot, for May edition of our ASL Game Day at Gameology.

I arrived a couple minutes after noon to find Scott Thompson at the front door of Gameology, a store-full of cardplayers, a parking lot full of bikers and classic cars, and some idiot screaming into a public address system accompanied by three guys scratching out what they appeared to misconstrue as “music”. Scott informed me that there was a Magic release tournament going and Kevin (the store owner) had not yet arrived. Jim Svette and Matt Blackman had arrived earlier, and had decided to adjourn to Matt’s house for a game.

Soon Kevin arrived and cleared some table space for us, while Eric Visnowski and Dave Nichlolas joined me and Scott checking out the car show. We were soon joined by John Lehman, Dan Plachta and Blair Bellamy.

We decided on an early lunch at The Hat to allow the crowd to clear out of the store, and returned to a much-improved table space situation. At that point, we got down to business:

Scott and EV paired up for “Tangled Up In Blue”, with Scott’s Americans defeating Eric’s Japanese.

Dan Plachta took the Germans against Blair and Dave as the Russians in “Shock at Kamenewo” from Dispatches. The Germans were victorious.

And John Lehman volunteered for a playtest of my MP IV design “Lynchpin”. In the first playing, John took the Russians, but some very bad luck (and good dice rolling by yours truly) stopped the Russian attack on turn 3. We flipped it around, and this time my Russians took advantage of some gaps in the German wire, and rolled to a quick victory, again by turn 3. We both felt that the scenario was playing pretty well; had nice feel, and plenty of replayablity, etc. and I was pleased with the result.

All of the games cleared by about 9:00, and we sat around a now nearly empty store shooting the breeze. We cleared out at 10:00.

Despite a chaotic start it turned into a pretty damn good game day, and we all enjoyed ourselves a great deal.