100 board games!! Bronze Board Game collector award from Board Game Geek!

 We did it! Somehow we have managed to rack up a collection of 100 boardgames (in one form or another)!! Everything from simple card games to complex multi-piece games. Although we have a core group of actual games we play, 100 is 100. I applied for and was awarded the Copper Boardgame Collector award!

Meeting of minds

Finally managed to meet Dave Estall today, another boardgamegeek-er who is literally based around the corner from work. He'd said about popping in during lunch as he often works at home; and today I happened to be walking past as he was parking up. Great to meet another gamer offline - he kindly invited me around - saying the next time he'd be working from home was at lunchtime this Friday, so I'll make the effort to pop over. Hopefully we'll be able to get some quick games in during these up and coming cold and wet Winter months!

"Why did our Dominion game last 1.5hrs?" forum post on Boardgamegeek gets a big response!

After our first game of Dominion, we were wondering why the game lasted 1.5 hours (the box says half an hour) and we still hadn't finished - there was still at least 8 of high scoring 6-point Victory Cards. So I posted a question on the General forum of Dominion on Boardgamegeek. And blimey did I get a reply! See it here at: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/540511/play-lasted-1-5-hrs-in-first-go

Big thumbs up for "gun camera picture" on Board game geek!

A picture I used in a recently blog post on Memoir '44 that was engineered to look like gun camera footage has received high praise on boardgamegeek after I posted it on there! Many thumbs up and comments - it even got onto the home page!

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/754100/memoir-44

My first boardgamegeek geeklist!

I decided to put together a geeklist on boardgamegeek based around my experience of being the only guy in a family of five gamers of various ages. I listed our most popular games and what we thought of them and received some good feedback so far; including an 8g tip from a game designer to buy a microbadge!

See the list at :http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/54948/games-for-when-dad-is-the-only-guy-in-a-family-of

Shock - games list goes down!

I just looked at my list of games on boardgamegeek - ha, its dropped to 71 - I was aiming for 100 but the big ASL sale culled a few from the ranks. A few Memoir '44 purchases should bump it up again. There have been some recent additions to the list, either from my local stockist, online or even from boot fairs.

Imperium Romanum II
Last Night on Earth
Lost Cities the Board Game
Memoir '44
Zombies!!! 2nd edition

Am looking at some new games to fill the ASL gap - possibly Power Grid...maybe...

Our first post - hurray!

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 UK game makers.

"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!