Good game it is

“Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view.” – Yoda

Presumably everyone reads James' blog, especially after all my recommendations. You will know therefore that he has had a bit of a mid-life crisis and strayed - hopefully temporarily - from the righteous path of historical wargaming. This has led him to buy lots of models based on a long-forgotten science fiction franchise, to use his superb modelling skills to turn razor blades into things that look like razor blades and to forget the word transceiver. So it was that earlier in the week we found ourselves playing X-Wing.

This was the second time I'd played the game and despite the fact that it ticks very few of my boxes I think it's a very good, very enjoyable game. I don't like sci-fi, I've never seen any of the films so don't know the back story, I have philosophic objections to collectible card games (admittedly partly based on the fact that I didn't think of such a brilliant money making idea first), and the idea of competition gaming just makes me laugh. But notwithstanding all that, it's a fun game to play. I regard it in the same way as I do most boardgames I play, Eurogames particularly, forget the theme, play the rules; sort of the opposite of the 'play the period not the rules' mantra. There was one slight problem with the scenario design in that the Imperial forces had zero chance of winning (despite sporting some impressively oddly named pilots), but that didn't seem to make much difference.

In other wargaming news, for some unaccountable reason I thought that a female visitor to the Casa Epictetus might be interested in the story of the great base fire. When I showed her the scorch marks she ignored them and went straight for the chariot. "Did you paint this?" she asked. When I replied in the affirmative her judgement was unequivocal. "It's crap." she said. In vain did I point out that whilst it almost certainly be crap when I'd finished it, as all I'd done so far was prime it (for details of that disaster see earlier posts), undercoat it (in terracotta as always) and slap a base coat on the horses and flesh on to the Celts, it seemed a tad harsh to write it off just yet. Sadly, she was unmoved, although she was more complimentary about the home made orange and mixed spice oat cookies.