When I was 12 my friend Travis introduced me to Dungeons and Dragons, which led to a 4 year romp through all manner of Role Playing Games and Table Top Games. The list is extensive, and I’ve honestly probably complete forgot the names of most of them, as I realized in catching up with Jay on facebook last night. We even wrote our own game, and 85 page rulebook, during that time. It was the earliest piece of creative construction that I’m really proud of.
But 4 years after 12, you turn 16, discover girls, get in fights with friends (often over the girls), and assume everything is *so important* all the time (definitely including the girls). The games were left behind as a casualty of growing up, and an attempt to change image from being “one of those geeks” to something else.
At the age of 32 I happily accept and embrace my geekiness. Recently Pyg (local friend, and an avid gamer) started talking about blood bowl again. Of all the games I left behind, that was probably my favorite. Think rugby meets lord of the rings. It’s played with miniatures on a table top pitch.
I kept thinking, and saying, “I’d be up for giving that a shot again”. Pyg printed out a couple of copies of the living rules for us to read up on, and finally we got a free evening for both of us to give it a shot. We’ve played a couple of games now, and have finally sorted out the rules again, which have evolved quite a bit since I bought my set back in 1991.
It’s a heck of a lot of fun, leading to some epic moments as when Pyg had completely knocked out every single player I had with time running out, while he was behind by 1 TD (some of that was because we were interpretting rules a bit wrong, but it’s level of epic was pretty impressive.)
It takes about 3 hours to run a match, and is a great thing to do over beer and wings. I’m looking forward to our next match now that we’ve got a clearer view on the rules, and we can actually start building some teams that last beyond just a single match.
It's always more complicated 