The Hamilton Road Games Group meet almost every Saturday at the Couch Branch Library on Hamilton Road in London, ON. We tend to go with table-top games of a more military/conflict type of game, but we're not completely tied to that. This year, we had the chance to be part of the London Games Crawl. The Games Crawl is a program to raise awareness of games available in the London area and (to be honest) to increase 'pull-through' for the gaming and/or comic book stores in the city. People visit the stores, get their card stamped, and enter raffles for prizes... of games!. It's been going on for a few years and this year the Games Group (33 or so years active) was part of it. Since we didn't have prizes and give-aways, the small number who stopped by were from the neighborhood and wanted to see what we being played.
We wanted to have a showing of table-top figure gaming that wasn't too complex, so we felt the best game to fill the bill was "Wings of War", a very playable and enjoyable game of WWI airplane combat. It's a game coming out of Italy and can be played with or without models.
Of course, it's 'way more fun with models.
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| I was "flying" Richenbacher's SPAD, the bottom plane. |
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| Bear and I fly by each other. |
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| Katie's Italian SPAD |
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The card are chosen three for each turn and show where the pilot/player wants to go.
Often we can't tell left from right, especially when your plane is headed toward you. |
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| Martin's hand? Could be. He's maneuvering the Neuport. |
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| Bear, Matt, and Beth discuss flying, lunch, and guarding the dumpster in basic training. |
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| Martin's Neuport |
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| Arial traffic jam |
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| ... although they get sorted our at times. |
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Katie's SPAD takes a run at Bear's Albatross.
If you get shot down, you just choose another plane and enter on the next cycle of turns. |
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| Once the SPAD went down, I chose a British SAE to try out, and the game ended soon after. |
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| Colour commentary from the press box - Aurel and Andy do the play by play. |
Following this, Martin, Matt, Bear, Katie, and I played a game of "Ticket to Ride", a train line building game set in the 1880-1890 era in North America. It's a great game but there's no sense taking photos of the playing. If you like board gaming, "Ticket to Ride" and a number of it's variants are well worth the time to get and play.
More to come later... again.
