Long time no post ...

View from the Wasatch Front overlooking the Great Salt Lake off in the distance. 
Many hikes this summer have pulled attention away from gaming!! Argh! Evil nature!

Greetings from wonderful northern Utah!

It has been an age since I have posted!  I've been busy with school (both teaching and taking classes) a big family a pretty busy gaming schedule and all of the other daily struggles each and every one of us deals with.

So to focus in on how gaming has been busy for me.  I am a lone wolf gamer, I do not like stores, I never have.  Perhaps I am a bit arrogant in that regard.  I do not like gaming with anyone who is a bad sport, immature, stinky, or just a jerk in general.  In my experience at gaming stores in Las Vegas and Utah.  There are far more that fall into the stinky/immature/jerkish powergamer category than not.  So I find that store play is not an option at all for me.

So when I moved to Utah I tried to avoid the inevitable time at the stores to recruit new home gaming group members.  Instead I relied on pen and paper games, meetup.com, etc. etc. and slowly found decent people to game with it took nearly 2 years as I'm in a lightly populated suburban area with about 250,000 residents spread out over a 20 mile radius.  Utah also has all sorts of quirks in terms of demographics. By that I mean I reside in a heavily Mormon state, which in my area is about 60% of the population and that is significant because Utah Mormons tend to stay with their own, almost exclusively. 

So long story short I was successful in building that 6-8 person gaming group.  People who generally just want to get together, socialize, have fun enjoyable games and leave it at that.  We have done a dozen or more different RPG campaigns.  We've played 40k, Bolt Action, a little Flames of War, etc. We have also played hundreds of different board games, non-collectible card games, etc.  People have come and gone from the gaming group but I've managed to hold the line and keep us solvent despite the occasional loss of a player.  In that regard I've lost a player every six months and gained 1 to 2 back.  So we've had slow growth.


Yea Olde Game Room in all its glory ...

This summer though I've had some major gaming projects, got the game room back in order, managed to acquire a solid amount of 1/72 WW II minis, a dragon's horde of 28 MM fantasy figures (seriously nearly 1000 figures, mostly the new reaper bones stuff but also a smattering of classic citadel models, etc.).

Our plans are to continue on with a solid, very fun foray into Warlord's Bolt Action WW II miniatures game.  Though we are using 1/72 scale minis instead of 28 MM, which we all like due to price and just the satisfaction of having a larger scale battlefield in the same amount of space.  The next move for us is going to be in using Song of Blade and Heroes in conjunction with Dungeonworld to have some hack and slash fantasy blended with small scale skirmish.  We are all really stoked about that. 

Also a fourth summer micro-con has come and gone (second since I was last active on this blog to be honest), the 4th annual LARRYCON we just completed over the 4th of July weekend.  Decent attendance, many games were played and much fun was had.  We played entirely too much 2nd edition Descent but it was a blast, the new Star Wars game saw the table, we conducted a demo of bolt action, a few dozens board games made it to the table, BBQing, boozing, etc. etc. good times indeed.

LARRYCON cigar stock, all gone now >:(

Anyway I have some ideas for some posts in the coming months so perhaps I'll keep a steady stream of posts rolling ... or not ... we'll see.

Just a little of the bones stuff that came in the mail this week
I went all in with 2 vampire level boxes and most of the
add-ons.  It amounts to years and years of stuff to paint.