Ooh, Shiny!

One thing about playing games, including wargames, is that I find myself always searching for the newest thing, the next thing, the latest thing to grab my interest. This time I'm picking up on a project I last pursued about forty years ago: My Game of All Games.

This was a game my best friend and I used to play when we were ten or twelve years old. I'm sure we weren't the first, and I know we weren't the last. Any kid with more than one game or toy tries to make a game using all his games and toys. It's that game you play where you use other games to resolve conflicts in the primary game.

For example: Risk. Any kid who has played this game more than once starts looking for a cooler mechanic than the handful-of-dice, attacker-favored, attrition-centered, "pick off the weak but don't overextend" gameplay that usually results. In our case, we played My Game of All Games. We'd use any other game to resolve the battles generated from the Risk board. Chess. Checkers. If the attack occurred in Asia, Chinese Checkers. If the attack involved a sea crossing, Battleship. Cards. If the attack involved a ridiculous number of armies grinding down a large number of enemy armies, several hands of War. Army guys mixed with marbles. Anything that was vaguely a "war" game. Stratego. Even "race" games like Sorry! and Aggravation.

Unfortunately, we didn't have any proper "wargames" just the usual board games and military toys of the average suburban kid in the early Seventies.

There were always several things about My Game of All Games that I wanted to improve, but then my best friend moved away, and I wasn't 12 years-old anymore and life went on.

Until a couple of weeks ago. For some reason, a bunch of things I was interested in but never continued on with have come back to me in a big way from those years of my life. One of them was the urge to play some games. To take the few cheap games I own and somehow make a semi-legitimate "wargame" out of them, right down to the level of actual engagements. But with a more, shall we say "horse and musket" mechanic than, for example, either chess or Battleship. Something more 18th century than Stratego. Something like a "board" game, with practically flat terrain, but played on maps at several different scales. Something perhaps more Eurocentric than the global Risk map. Something where actual battles could be fought out.

I've spent about six or eight months learning about wargames, specifically miniature tabletop wargaming, that is, wargaming with actual figures. Along the way I became really inspired to reinvent My Game of All Games.

But first, I'll need a new copy of Risk. Some Legos. Some masking tape. A Wikipedia map printed at poster size. An empty table. A lot of floor space. And all the other games in the house. Time to take inventory. Where's that deck of cards...?