Dag Nabbit!

I've got five or six games of various sorts heaped up on my nightstand, all of which I intend to play "sometime soon". The problem is, about the time I pick one of them and start to brush up on the rules, the next one down in the heap calls to me, so I pick it up, and then the third one calls to me...

Seriously, the top contender right now is Avalon Hill's rather choice "Gunslinger" game. I have a soft spot for the Old West to start with and the use of cards rather than dice takes the game out of the strict wargame category. I think the combat system is very strange - it's so disorganized I'd swear Richard Hamblen was suffering from a fever dream when he wrote the rules - but once you play it through a few times, you at least get to the point you can work with it and appreciate the rest of the game. It's a fun game to play, and it gets even better when you go the whole Mythic Old West route. "A man's got to make some kind of living..." "Dyin' aint no kind of livin', boy..."

Then I have Great Medieval Battles, or at least half thereof, the Decision Games reissue of the venerable (and very spendy) SPI version. I'm not too interested in Bannockburn, but I am interested in Angorra. Just to look at the units, though, I fear that Sultan Bayazid is liable to lose his turban pretty regularly in this game; Tamerlane brought The Package and outnumbers the Sultan about 2:1 by thumbnail estimate. I thought it was pretty close until I realized those marks on the hillside weren't bushes but more of Tamerlane's units! Cricky, my flank is overflowed! I like the Great Medieval Battles system; I think it has good feel and detail for minimum outlay in cranial smoke, but it's a two-player wargame and not the sort of thing one springs on house guests.

Then there is Car Wars, a late addition because it was hiding in a different box. It can handle as many players as can sit at the table, but obviously the more players you have, the clumsier it gets (imagine 600 people playing one game and you'd have a pretty good scale model of the 101 at rush hour). Car Wars is sort of like Star Fleet Battles: it can be made as complicated as you like. I like the simple early version, myself. We don't need no steenking hoeveorcraft... houvourkraft... heoorvorcarft... Hovercraft, he's saying hovercraft...

And what's this? Boot Hill! Not much of a tabletop game in the usual sense of the word, and kind of disappointing as an RPG, but it's got great bones and deserves to be better.

Then there's SS Panzer, a game that dates from the upper strata of my collection. Why this game appeals to me remains a perpetual mystery, but it does. It's sort of like Across 5 Aprils meets Mein Kampf, or PGG with chit-draw activation, but the system is weird, more like Yahtzee than anything else, though I am perpetually reminded of Risk and/or Kaiser's Battle every time I wonder how many dice I should throw. And those mystery Russian battalions make one question the accuracy of it all, not to mention the fact the game only lasts FOUR turns! (Mostly, one darkly suspects, to factor out the arrival of powerful Soviet reinforcements in the afternoon - heaven forbid the SS should be shown having a hard time, I guess).

But hey, at least they can spell "Leibstandarte". That's sumthin.

And then there's the Task Force classic Prochorovka, described by its creators as a body-slam at the hands of schnapps-breathed geeks. Sounds like fun. I'll have two, please.

Yet curiously, the game I most want to play right now is a game I no longer own: Inkerman, an installment in the Crimean War Quad. Why did I ever sell that? Only the good are sold early.

So a little while ago I was out in the garage doing preservation work on my collection and realized that I was subconsciously building another "to be played soon pile". I knew what it was when I saw that it included Red Star/White Star 2, Mechwar '77, Napoleon's Last Battles and Little Round Top. But NO! Just say NO to more games on the to-be-played-pile! If this madness doesn't stop, I'll wake up one morning and find The Next War, Drang Nach Osten and - oh crap - Campaign for North Africa on my pile. And that game alone is good for about seven and a half years of playing time...

What was my point? I didn't have one. Sue me already.