Scrum in Miniature

I'm lucky I've gotten to know some of the fellas in the Harford Area Weekly Kriegspielers (HAWKs) in the past year. They're great guys to game with, and if I didn't live so far from where they meet on Friday nights, I would be a regular at their gatherings. Regrettably, I have only been able to break free from work early enough to fight my way through rush hour traffic for their games a couple of times in the past year. Fortunately, when the stars have aligned, it has always been worth the trip ( recap of my previous trek). Last night, fellow Scrum Clubber Steve B. and I headed out early and got to Aberdeen, Maryland with enough time to grab some tasty barbecue at Chaps Pit Beef before heading over to a local church rec building where the HAWKs stage their battles. Last night both games were fantasy themed (my sense is that usually at least one game on club night is a straight up historical battle). The ever-affable Eric Schlegel invited me up to play in his ga...

The Second Saturday Scrum Club had recently been discussing Steve Jackson's current Kickstarter, which he launched to republish his seminal Fantasy Trip game line.  As some older grognards may know, Melee (1977) and Wizard (1978) were originally published as separate companion installments in the MicroGame series (#3 and #6, respectively, with the series' first installment being the more enduring futuristic tank battle game, O.G.R.E. , also designed by Jackson). When Jackson left the company Metagaming Concepts in 1980 to start his own game publishing venture, he relinquished the rights to the Fantasy Trip series, its programmed MicroQuest adventure supplements, and the fledgling role playing game system, In the Labyrinth , being built atop the Melee/Wizard nexus. For the historical minded among us, it's worth noting that the Fantasy Trip contains the genetic code for the subsequently more successful role playing game, GURPS (Generic Universal Role Playing Syste...

Some readers may recall that I attended my first game convention, a late bloomer at 47 years old, by making the trek to Historicon 2017 . It was a wonderful experience for me, and I left the weekend with a heady enthusiasm for this hobby I'd only recently discovered. This year's Historicon marked another first for me: Crafting and running my own convention game. Back in December I recruited some friends and new acquaintances I had connected with in the D.C. metro area to establish a monthly game group, the Second Saturday Scrum Club. Every month we meet in my dining room and somebody sets up a miniatures game for us to play. In late spring we gathered to try a new set of intriguing rules by Ganesha Games' Andrea Sfiligoi, Sellswords & Spellslingers . They were a hit with the group , and the next day Steve Braun offhandedly mentioned how perfect they would be for running a scenario based around Robert E. Howard's classic Conan yarn, "Beyond the Black Rive...