Scrum in Miniature

As the year crawls to an end, I'm looking through this blog and noticing a couple of posts I started and never finished. This is one of them. Back in July 2019, I placed the photos on the page, jotted down a few bullet-point placeholder notes, and then never actually went back and wrote anything to post.   The post was meant to be my informal review of Rangers of Shadow Deep after my first game of it with Josh O'Conner, who set it up for us to try in his basement. I think I never finished this post because I was not very impressed with the game but I knew Josh was, and we hadn't been gaming together long enough for me to be sure my candor about the game wouldn't hurt his feelings and sour a budding gaming friendship. I consider Josh more than a gaming friend these days, and so I'll go ahead and post this with some very short notes fleshing out the bullet points I had left as a reminder for myself back in 2019 (at least the one's I can still decipher the ...

  A few weeks ago my good pal Peter Megginson came over to Scrum Hall (my dining room) and set up a game for the two of us to play with my other good pal, Steve Braun. He gave me a lot of choices ahead of time for the type of game he could put on, including many periods and genres I had never tried before. Peter is one of my wargaming buddies who likes to play "historical" games in addition to all of the "genre" games (fantasy, sci-fi, etc.) I tend to gravitate toward, and so this was an opportunity for me to branch out and try something new. We ended up settling on a game centered on a fictitious Vietnam War-era operation. I can't claim to remember all of the details of the scenario at this point, but the gist involved one side playing the Americans who had choppered in near a village in Laos to try to extract any survivors from a downed huey. The other side played VC who saw the US chopper go down and were looking to take its crew prisoner. Scoring was based o...