Scrum in Miniature

  Last weekend was the second Saturday of the month, and so the Scrum Club met once again in my dining room for a day of gaming. As I've mentioned in recent posts, the pandemic built up such a demand for in-person gaming amongst the Scrummers that we've expanded the itinerary from a single miniatures game that we start around 4:30 to now include an additional game at 1:00 p.m. as a prelude of sorts to the main event. The earlier game has a bit of a shorter time allotment (we have to start and finish within roughly three hours), and we allow for board games and RPG one-offs to hit the table in this first slot (the "headliner" 4:30 game will almost always remain a miniatures game of some sort). Since starting to meet in person again this past May, the first game of the day has been a board game ( GKR: Heavy Hitters twice) or an RPG. Last month Rich M. ran a great game of Traveller -cum- Thieves' World , and this month Jared S. had us try a game of Blades in the Dar...

I was fortunate to make Patrick Todoroff's acquaintance when we were both simply avid gamers who haunted some of the same online gaming forums. We found each other quite companionable in terms of the games we both enjoyed and our approaches to making them fun for ourselves and our respective game groups. Within a couple of years, though, all of that changed. Now Mr. Todoroff is a game designing maverick, churning out three games and multiple supplements for them in the past two to three years. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised given that he was a disciplined, prolific novelist before ever turning his pen to game design. That facility with narrative is likely one of the things that made us so simpatico in the gaming discussions we had online over the years. I was excited for Patrick when Osprey published his great Stalker -inspired Zona Alfa rules, and it seemed like it was no time at all before he'd published Exploit Zero (renamed from the original Hardwired as a resul...