Let me know what you think about playing games in public places like restaurants, parks, bars, fast food joints, and bus stops?
Toby, Tom, Shane, and I playing some Smash Up at Chipotle in Fresno, CA! :) Board and card games have long been apart of my house and American culture, but it seems to be inappropriate or frowned upon to play games while at a restaurant or eatery. I like to play games while I eat, not only is it something I enjoy, it's also good for us. First of all, it helps us all the eat slower, taking time in between scarfing it all down. Two, it allows us to digest our food between bites and possibly feel more full before we have over-eaten. And lastly, it helps us enjoy our eating time as not just another social encounter, but a memory-making, brain-stimulating, and fun-creating time. That is my small rant about playing games while eating at restaurants and fast-food eateries. I will continue to play and encourage others to do so as well, because if you pay for food, it shouldn't matter how long you are there for, as long as you are respectful and a paying customer. That's all for today.
Let me know what you think about playing games in public places like restaurants, parks, bars, fast food joints, and bus stops?
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I have been working a lot and finishing up my Masters at FPU so I haven't had much time to post. Although as we all know, that isn't much of an excuse. That just means I didn't think about recently. I have had enough time to watch Big Bang Theory, Whitney, and Sherlock recently, so why not post on my blog? I'm lazy. That's why.
So all in all it's been a pretty awesome couple of months. I've been working on a few new card games, perfected one and started some preliminary work on a couple others. That has been fun. I have also been disc golfing more recently. I had a drought for awhile where I hadn't gone in month or so and that was just weird. :( But now I'm back and I'm loving it. I realized that I will probably never be as good as I was when I was playing weekly, but I will always love it. :) During the winter I always seem to rack up more board gaming time since it's harder to go outside and play in the sun. This winter is no exception. I have been playing a lot of games! If you ever want to come over and play some board games with me, feel free to call me up or hit me up on Facebook. I love it. Just this week at my lifegroup we played "Game of Things", "Bohnanza", and "Family Business". So much fun and so much bonding going on. That's one of the easiest ways for men to bond, through games/sports. A smart man once told me, "Women tend to bond with each other face to face, through shared conversation, while men bond side by side, through shared experience. We have fought side by side in wars for millennia, and it is in our blood to do so, not because we love bloodshed, but because we bond with other men when we are by their side through adversity and trial. " Now I know what you are thinking, games do not equal adversity and trial?! Well, yes and no. They do include many of the same feelings as men at war: camaraderie, teamwork, betrayal, disappointment, hope, fear, and frustration. These characteristics of board-gaming make it much more like war than much of what we do during our day. So fight an imaginary war instead of a real one and play a board game! And that's the way the cookie crumbles...uh huh...uh huh....uh huh. BTW. I love my board games and I love playing them for hours (even days) on end. Over time though, I have begun to feel the pull to buy group/party/easy/light/quick games because they are easier to teach to other people and to get non-gamers to play. So many people won't even give a hard game a chance. They just see that it looks complicated and give up on it. And the attention span of people is getting shorter and shorter to the point where we won't be able to sit down and play a game for an hour without calling it boring and walking away. That makes me sad. My long, difficult games have sat on the shelf collecting dust while my quick, less strategic, and much easier games have been played continually. This makes me sad in many ways because I miss the days when I would sit down with my cousins and play Axis and Allies for 7 hours straight! Those were the days. I love these days too, and I definitely get more laughter out of game night now (with Loaded Questions particularly). But I can't help but miss those old classic games and miss sitting around snacking and conquering my Saturday away. I want that back someday, that's all.
So I had a dream the other day. I dreamed that I owned a business. It was a great dream. It began with me starting up my own board game company. I invented some board and card games that started to become popular in Fresno and the Central Valley. Then I held gaming conventions for all my fellow gamers to come together and enjoy some time playing games. Then I opened my own store with Tia, which was called 'BTW' (which could stand for By The Way, By The Weemes, or Ben and Tia Weemes).
It was a game store, but more for casual gamers than for hardcore gamers. I didn't sell D&D or Magic: The Gathering, I didn't have miniatures or Warhammer 40k tournaments, it was all board and card games for the much more average gaming groups. It boasted games like Cranium, Smart Ass, Dixit, Pit, Settlers of Catan, Quarriors, and Bohnanza. Still keeping it averagely nerdy without living in my mom's basement. There was also a coffee shop area for relaxing, still with board game tables if you wanted to play and we also sold beer and wine for the older crowd. Sometimes live bands would come and play at our venue, we would take out some of the tables and make room for them. Mostly jazz, blues, soft rock, acoustic, hipster, and music like that. Mostly it was board gaming, drinking tea/coffee, relaxing, reading books, and grooving to some tunes. There were walls of books that you could read while you were there, and then buy if you wanted to keep reading them. Overall it had a very chill vibe with an undercurrent of nerdy-ness. Tia could have book club there on certain nights, learn a new craft night, open mic night, dancing nights, or really any number of fun events if we wanted to. It was a long dream, it made me extremely happy, and I would love to actually make this a reality someday. Do you have hopes and dreams that you think are unattainable? Are they impossible or just difficult? Dream on. Quarriors has the excitement of a dice battle game, with an added ‘deckbuilding’ twist: players customize their dice pools during the game using resources generated by their rolls. Quarriors takes the best of deckbuilding games without the tedium of shuffling. Take a typical deckbuilding game, add the speed and fun of dice and in 60 minutes you’re on your second or third game trying unique strategies against your opponents. Tide of Iron is a scenario-based game, with the available forces, objectives, map, and victory conditions being set by each given scenario. It features loads of plastic figures, including soldiers, equipment, heavy weapons, and combat vehicles, cards, dice, cardboard markers, and modular game boards that will represent the customizable terrain of this scenario-based wargame.
The twelve double-sided map tiles, plus the dozens of included terrain hexes, allow for limitless potential combinations, and each scenario can be enhanced by special rules, objective markers, troop allotments, and other variations. The only limiting factor is your imagination! |
Ben Weemes.Hi. My name is Ben Weemes, I love to dance and sing, I love Tia Weemes and my family, and I love games and books, I love Jesus and the San Antonio Spurs. Categories
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