SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
Strange Apparitions is a local comics, graphic novels and geek culture merchandise store that set up in Spalding nearly a year ago. The shop was based out of a cosy corner in the Spalding Lifestyle And Garden centre (a building rejoicing in the acronym S.L.A.G.). It was nice enough there, but a bit off the beaten track. Along with fellow traders Uptown Vinyl Records, Strange Apparitions have just relocated to the Baytree Garden Centre and held their re-opening today. A bit of context for the out-of-towners: Baytree is is local institution. It started off as a roadside stall in 1970 when Reinhard Biehler and his British wife Yvonne went in to business together. Now it's a 16 acre site that hosts a massive garden centre, cafes, children's entertainment, an owl sanctuary and various small traders selling antiques, witchy art and, latterly, comics and records. So this is a great gig for Strange Apparitions, who now offer a sort of comics-creche for lost souls whose partners are off selecting dahlias and compost. Wanting to show solidarity with a local retailer like this, I popped along to the re-opening celebrations along with Spalding Wargames Club vice-chairman Craig Jackson. Then, you know, lunch in the sunshine with our Other Halves. It took me a while to track down the retail space itself - it's right at the back of the site, to the left of the (excellent) restaurant. It's a good space: nicely carpeted, bright and airy, without the vague presentiment of being within four feet of a rat that you felt back at the SLAG Centre. This is a sweet place to browse! I stole a few moments of shop owner Alex's time. He's delighted with the move and the new premises - as well he should be. He's built a loyal consumer base and promotes the store today with Deadpool and Ghostbusters cosplayers. I'm only a minor comics fan, but I rarely found myself out at the SLAG Centre (love that name) unless I was visiting the adjacent hospital - but I'm often over at Baytree and frequently killing time while my Beautiful Gardener inspects the roses. I doubt I'm alone in these regards, so Alex will get a lot more impulsive purchases from people like me. Like that lovely hardbound edition of Planet Hulk... Alex stocks a few board games as well: I caught sight of some expansions for Dark Souls: The Card Game and Resident Evil. If Keyforge decks turn up, he'll clean me out. Hopefully, SWC and Strange Apparitions can promote each other. The move was only possible with the support of Uptown Vinyl Records, who cover an even larger space. It seems only right, as the father of a vinyl-consuming daughter, to share some images of their busy trading space too. We wish both stores the best of luck and promise to be back soon with bulging wallets. You can follow them on Facebook by clicking on the links below:
0 Comments
I drop in Black Lion Games whenever I go back to my old home town to visit family and friends there. It's an easy-to-miss shop on Buccleuch Street, near the University. Seemingly following the tradition of FLGS (Friendly Local Gaming Stores), as established by Newark's Wild Ways, the shop front is completely unadorned. However, it does break with convention by announcing its identity with an ageing notice board beside the door. Argh. The Grocer's Apostrophe seeps into Gaming... On the sunny afternoon in April when I turn up, the shutters are down. Have they closed? No, assistant manager Stu has just been next door getting a coffee and hurries back to let me in. It's nice inside. Airy and bright, with well-stocked shelves - though Stu is at pains to point out that, had I turned up the very next day, I would have found the shelves overflowing with the haul from Conpulsion, Edinburgh's very own Games Convention. It's heartening to see stock like this. When I first discovered Black Lion, it was a set of shelves in the basement of a retro-fashion store called Flip. What was I doing in a retro-fashion store, you might well ask? Well, I was younger then and had delusions of vintage style consciousness. I think I was looking for a leather jacket. I found Liam's stall instead. It's not been a stall for a long time (and Flip closed in 2007) but there's still one shelf that commemorates those humble beginnings: the vintage roleplaying games and the cardboard boxes of second hand modules and indie rulebooks that demand to be browsed. There were lean years in "the new premises" (as I still think of it). I remember coming in to nearly-bare shelves when stock had to be sold to fund new orders. It's not like that now. Business is holding up. There are evening clubs for Magic: The Gathering and Keyforge. Not a bare shelf in sight - and this is before the arrival of the Mighty Haul. I chat away to Stu for quite awhile. He's immensely friendly and knowledgeable, speaking with equal enthusiasm and insight about Monopoly (further to our evening of playtesting the world's most popular boardgame) and unknown (to me) indie RPGs like Apocalypse World. Stu (on the right) helps out another customer You get a real sense from Black Lion that the hobby's in good shape. A youthful enthusiasm has given Liam and his friends a livelihood, perhaps a vocation. They outlasted Flip and its vintage T-shirts anyway. After all that, it only seems right to buy something. Here's a thing on a high shelf, out of the shrinkwrap and unpriced: a game I've never heard of by Donald X. Vaccarino, the guy who devised Dominion. It's a timey-wimey worker placement game called Temporum. Stu looks it up on BGG, checks out the reviews, counts out the components to check they're all there, then baggies up the cards and meeples for me.
What a gent. That's how to make a sale! Recent blogs have bemoaned how commentators faced with the gaming hobby invariably fall back on lazy quips about Monopoly. I thought it was time to put to the test the hypothesis that Monopoly is a uniquely fractious and tedious game. So: I sourced an old (1960s) edition of the game on eBay, rounded up some veteran gamers, checked up the CORRECT rules (auctions and all!) and gathered together the Dirty Half Dozen for a journey into the dark heart of Capitalism... We have been warned that Monopoly is deeply boring and lasts for hours. Popular lore tells us that we will all fall out and go home with sore feelings. But at the start, spirits are high and the tokens are on the starting space, anxious for the off! The first 20 minutes pass merrily. This is Phase 1, where circling the board carries only trivial penalties and you get to buy the properties you land on. The randomness of dice mean some people get lucky, assembling near-monopolies very quickly. Others are less lucky. I get 3 Stations on consecutive turns, but Oliver gets the 4th. I pass on buying the Electric Company, wary of the bad reputation of the 'utilities', and Ray pays over the odds for it. Karl takes this tactic to an extreme, passing on several properties, triggering auctions and driving up the price so that other people pay more. Later, he will come to see this approach is misguided. Once most of the properties have been bought, the game enters Phase 2, which is negotiation. Everyone wants someone else to trade them a property, but no one wants to allow someone else to get a monopoly too easily. Sweeteners are added. Eventually, deals are made, monopolies are acquired and the first green houses start to rise on Richard's pink monopoly. I must say, this part of the game was fun. Realising that 3 Stations were a modest earner but offered no way of competing later in the game, I paid through the noise for Brown properties from Karl and Richard to acquire my first monopoly - the most rubbish monopoly on the board. Nevertheless, I figured I could grow from here. Then people start going bankrupt: first Alex, then Oliver. Their departures bring fresh auctions to the table as their portfolios are sold off. This bidding is very different. People know what they are after and the bidding is fierce, even reckless. Whole monopolies are up for grabs and there are vicious hate plays and, yes, over-extension. I fall victim to this, spend too much money, trade away my Stations to Karl to expand my properties even further then get brought down by those very Stations when I cannot pay the rent for landing on them. Irony! Karl is floundering, with Stations and money, but no monopolies. Ray is in a strong place. He has built hotels on the Oranges to rival Richard's Pink empire - and the Oranges are more likely to catch out players leaving Jail. But fate has a different tale to tell! They call it Death Alley..... Alas for Ray, his empire goes down like the Bastille: first he has to mortgage properties, then sell his hotels, then go bankrupt. It was mostly unlucky dice rolls landing him on expensive rents. His property portfolio is extensive and Karl and Richard carve it up between them. We're just over 90 minutes in to the game and down to the Final Two. Everyone else has been knocked out in rapid succession (in the last half hour) and still spectates with interest. Richard has the stronger portfolio and the deadly hotels in Pink, but Karl now has a monopoly (finally!) on Yellow which could be lucrative if he can build there. Unfortunately, everything that has made the game compelling so far disappears now that there are only two players left. There will be no more auctions. The two have no incentive to trade. They just circle the board, round and round, Karl slipping past Richard's hotel-strewn power base on blue/pink/orange time after time with lucky rolls, while Richard lurks in Jail, collecting rent but paying Karl only small amounts. And this goes on for another hour! Eventually, it ends as it must, with Karl finally landing on Pall Mall's hotel and being crippled by the bill. Richard is victorious, but by this point the interest is gone. The knocked-out players are tapping on their phones, the still-contending ones are numbed to the endless dice rolls. The endgame span on for far too long. Closing Thoughts First off, I was surprised by how much fun we had for the first 90 minutes of this game. You can see why families and old school friends bring Monopoly to the table. Phase 1 is good-natured and full of promise. Who doesn't like circling the board buying things? At this point, the rents are modest and the rewards significant. It also feels rather like modern resource management games: you are building your 'victory engine'. Phase 2 is much more competitive and, for hobbyist gamers, very fulfilling. Working out what to trade and how to persuade, these are fulfilling skills to use. Staying in Jail becomes a winning practice: you can still charge rent and bid, but you don't have to advance round the board for a couple of turns. When players are knocked out, more auctions are triggered and these are psychologically charged affairs. The knock-outs happen close together: when one player goes bankrupt another won't be far behind. It's hard to imagine families and casual gamers enjoying this though. How can children aggressively bid against their parents or strike coercive trade deals with their older siblings? Why would friends and lovers enjoy a game where their partners bid against them ruthlessly to drive up the costs or refuse to trade with them while agreeing to trade with someone else? Monopoly is simply a bit too hard core, in a psychological sense, for family fun. This of course is where house rules creep in: kitties of money being paid out to people landing on Free Parking and players in Jail being unable to charge rent. These 'fixes' make the game feel less unfair, but they only prolong the inevitable. Most of my work colleagues who claim to enjoy Monopoly are surprised to hear about auctions and property trading: they just don't use these rules, robbing the game of its only strategic choices and stretching out the play time even further. The real problem for us was the spinning endgame. Once it's down to two players with all the properties divided between them, there are no further choices to make but a lot of dice to roll before the final bankruptcy occurs. There's no value in playing this far; instead a timer is needed to stop the game at (say) the 2-hour mark, with victory going to the player with the most wealth at that time. A worthwhile experience then and perhaps worth repeating, with time limits in place. The official rules contain a Shorter Game variant and I think it would be fun to see if that retains the fun while bringing then to a conclusion before fatigue sets in. I'll report on that in due course.
|
This month I am mostlyClub members discuss their gaming month Archives
April 2019
Categories
All
|