Scrum in Miniature

Although I've been socially isolating and working from home for six weeks, my work hasn't really slowed down. In fact, if anything, working at an international financial NGO has meant my day job has become more stressful and frenetic these past several weeks as the pandemic has spurred on a massive global recession, just the sort of thing my employer was created to help address. But for my own sanity, I have made time to do a bit of gaming online with friends, including a cameo turn in a session of my friend Rich's ongoing Empire of the Petal Throne  campaign, and a session of his  Middle Earth Role Playing game that seems to be turning into a standing Sunday afternoon game. Steve Braun and I got in a game of TSR's Battlesystems (2nd ed.),  played remotely via streaming video from his dining room, as well as a go at a cooperative scenario recently released for Conan: The Board Game (Monolith). I’ve been waiting to play MERP since 1984. Good times sneaking ar...

I wasn't at all certain I was going to be able to sneak off to the Barrage Convention this Saturday due to crazy work commitments this time of year, but everything fell into place on Friday to allow me to spend Saturday gaming with old friends while making some new ones. Barrage is the convention put on by the Harford Area Weekly Kriegspielers ( HAWKs ), and this was something like their 23rd year organizing the event. I readily admit that the first Barrage Con I attended in January 2018 was a significant inspiration for me in proposing to my own club that we should start  Scrum Con . The HAWKs are on the whole an exceptionally amiable group of gamers, as I've written many times on this blog in the past, and I've mixed with them enough times now that I feel pretty comfortable calling them pals (whether or not the feeling is mutual). It was fun getting to bump into some of the stalwarts from the area who attend these conventions, including a few folks who either atten...