Welcome back to our gaming blog!! We have not blogged about our games for around 2 years and in that time Blogger had changed and and somehow I lost access to the original blog, even though I could see it. So I copied all the original posts, stuck them here and continued under this new blog. Here goes!
Welcome to our gaming blog. That sounds rubbish, but there you go! Basically this is a web log of the Bradshaw Tribe (Frank, Anita, Kavita, Roshni and Maya) and our board gaming experiences and game plays. Now that sounds really dull, but basically until a few months ago we as a family thought board games were all Cluedo (Or Clue for our American friends), Monopoly and Buckaroo. Fortunately at some point of doing research into the Advanced Squad Leader (ASL) system, I fell over the fantastic site www.boardgamegeek.com.
This amazing site provides detail, reviews, help, photos and all manner of other details on EVERY game, it seems, on Earth! Using this site I documented that as a family I owned about 50 games. Crikey. But if I had so many, then why were we not playing them? Why were the children always face down in a gameboy, or playing separately in their bedrooms and generally not having fun with us as a family? Because all of these games were old, or wargames, or so out of print I dare not touch them or unpunch the counters without fear of them loosing value on Ebay or something when they are sold by the kids in the future to house us in some old peoples home.
Then I thought Hang on! Games are there to be played with, not observed from a ritual distance and taken out every so often to be loved over and then put away again! After chatting to a few people and joining the local geek guild, we started to find out about other games, family games, euro games, games made by people other than those at MB, Waddingtons and other wonderful
"So what is a Euro game?" I asked
"It's a game made by a European game maker." They told me
"The Germans make games?!"
And not only them - but lots of people in lots of countries. In some sort of jingoistic, euroism madness, I assumed only us Brits and Americans made games of quality with hot pressed Chinese made parts. But as it seemed, lots of people world wide also knew how to make and play games! The shock and horror! And apparently, they were a hell of a lot better at it than us!
