Is This the Real Life?

Is this just fantasy?

I uncovered a thing left to die in a corner, covered in dust and dead flies. It was this blog. I abandoned it some six years ago and wasn’t planning to return to it. Who knows, perhaps it’s not dead yet.

We’ll see. My tabletop roleplaying activity hasn’t been dormant for quite that long – perhaps two years – but to make up for that I have been playing a lot of boardgames.

Last year I re-discovered an old sweetheart of mine, namely the 18xx game genre. I bought the “original”* 1830 back when it was published by Avalon Hill in 1986, but stupidly got rid of it when we moved in 2002. It was great returning to the old train/economics games to see that there are more than 100 18xx games out there now, and that major publishers – most notably GMT Games with 1846 and recently 1862 – have begun to publish them as well. I have begun infecting my local gaming community with the 18xx bug and so far it’s going great.

*Strictly speaking, there was a game before 1830: 1829, also by the honourable Francis Thresham, but 1830 was the first published by a large (in 1986 boardgaming scale) company. Thresham is a legend and  a hero, AND a former bus engineer – besides 1830, he also designed Civilization. Edward Uhler from Heavy Cardboard interviewed him last year.