London Games Crawl --- 29 April 2017

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.

I was "flying" Richenbacher's SPAD, the bottom plane.

Bear and I fly by each other.

Katie's Italian SPAD

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.

Martin's hand? Could be. He's maneuvering the Neuport.

Bear, Matt, and Beth discuss flying, lunch, and guarding the dumpster in basic training.

Martin's Neuport

Arial traffic jam

... although they get sorted our at times.

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.

Once the SPAD went down, I chose a British SAE to try out, and the game ended soon after.

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.