The lack of updates in the last couple of days has been mostly because my gaming time has been consumed with two things.<\/p>\n
First, I puttered around with the Lord of the Rings Online<\/em> open beta. It’s cute, but probably not cute enough to hold me any longer than World of Warcraft did. Which means that I probably won’t subscribe unless I get a compelling professional reason to do so. It’s fun running around as a hobbit hunter with a feathered cap, sure, but a tiny piece of my nerd brain resists the idea of a 300 hit point halfling regularly schooling two or three full-sized men at the same time, not to mention all the spiders and wolves I killed. The hobbits of Tolkien’s books are not adventurous, in any case, and seeing a few dozen of them running and jumping around me is a little silly. <\/p>\n Yeah, I know. Never let literature get in the way of gaming. After all, I have no problems with a Middle Earth RTS. But “stumbling” upon a Nazgul Rider on the road to some Shire village is just too much of a reminder that the literature is happening in this very same world. On that note, it’s one thing to have a persistent world where the player can’t make radical changes to the environment, but the constant references to Bagginses and Dark Lords and the like keep reminding me that Carbo of the Harfoots is a side character in a book I’ve read that will never be finished in this world. In LotRO, Frodo can’t get to Mount Doom – it would spoil the game for everyone.<\/p>\n Second, for much of the week I have also been playing Paths of Glory<\/em>, the GMT board game<\/a> oft mentioned in the comments of my recent post on World War I and gaming<\/em>. Seizing the initiative, Bruce Geryk and I loaded up the cyberboard version of the game and, using the automated card tracking system through Warhorse Sims<\/a>, I quickly learned the basics and remembered why I like GMT games so much.<\/p>\n We didn’t really “finish” a game. The teaching game led to my Russian army getting obliterated, so Bruce, always a good sport, called a mulligan and we began a real game. It ended in the second month when my opponent carelessly moved two strong German armies too far into Russia, and I cut off their supply in the final round. I had a clear march to Berlin at this point, and with the West still mostly intact, we agreed to end the game. I think we both have a lot to learn, in any case, as we kept forgetting to do things like Mandated Offensive rolls. Thank God for both Skype and searchable PDF rulebooks.<\/p>\n Next up is For the People<\/em>, though if I can figure out why Ageod’s American Civil War<\/em> isn’t installing properly, I might get busy fighting on another front.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The lack of updates in the last couple of days has been mostly because my gaming time has been consumed with two things. First, I puttered around with the Lord of the Rings Online open beta. It’s cute, but probably not cute enough to hold me any longer than World of Warcraft did. Which means […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[7,101],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-ac","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}