Gaming weekend.....

Well what a weekend that was.... everyone was very excited about having a whole weekend of gaming, especially me in that Dad was due over and I wanted to show off out new front room lay out and the game storage table with all the games. Sad I know but there you go.

Friday evening we played Formula Motor Racing - a great little simple play-by-placing-cards game using two plastic cards per team on a strip of 12 car places. As the cards are played, events take place in the race and positions change and cars crash out. Very simple and exciting, easily played by Maya (4) with little prompting - until it got to the point where Anita was giving "Strategic advice" on her card placement. In the end Anita came 1st and 2nd.

Then we had a game of Zooloretto, a fab zoo based management game from Germany. It looks complex but it is very simple to play - although this is not to understate its beautifully simple strategic side that the girls (even Maya) managed to pick up on - go German game makers!! Basically you have a zoo which you have to fill up the attractions in order to gain money to do more things with your zoo, expand it, move animals about, buy animals etc. Each turn everyone places a card counter onto a wooden "Lorry" with three spaces on them to carry animals, stalls, money etc. Then everyone takes the turn to draw a card and place on a lorry of their choice.

The player can keep doing this or take a lorry (Say they want the lorry with two elephants and the drinks stall or dustbin as Maya calls it.) and distribute the animals in the zoo. Any spare go into the barn. Once the counters have run out, then scoring takes place. Animals in the barn count against the final score. This is a basic coverage of the game but it is very compelling to play.

Unfortunately a broken washing machine, that lead to a 4.5hr round trip to Farnborough, on Saturday messed up our plans - so no gaming on Saturday and we were so tired, we didn't do any on Sunday!! :(

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!