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.
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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! I love those friends that are so interested in what you are doing and what you are saying that they make you excited to tell them anything. I have a friend who showed me an idea of his and I had a similar idea. I told him I had thought about the same thing and he was so excited to hear about my idea that it made me super energized about the project and I made a large amount of progress on it in the subsequent weeks. His energy and passion spilled over and excited me to continue working hard on a project I had become disenchanted with. Those friends are the best. Seriously.
I love board and card games, I have started writing a few reviews of some of my favorite games. I only have two so far, but I will continure to post. The first two I have written on are Battle Line and Bohnanza. These are both card games and they are fairly easy games to learn and play, but the similarities end there. Battle Line is a war-themed card game in which two opponents face off across a 'battle line' and attempt to win the battle by taking 5 of 9 flags or 3 adjacent flags. Flags are decided by placing cards into 3 card poker-type hands on either side of the flag (similar to straight flush, 3 of a kind, straight, flush, etc). The side with the highest 'formation' of cards wins the flag. (My Review Here) Bohnanza is a bean planting card game in which you cannot rearrange your hand, as you need to play the cards in the order that you draw them. The cards are colorful depictions of beans in various descriptive poses, and the object is to make coins by planting fields (sets) of these beans and then harvesting them (getting coins for them). To help players match their cards up, the game features extensive trading and deal making. (My Review Here) That's all for today. I will write more reviews, share more ideas, ask more questions, and generally bore you to death with my ramblings...
I never thought I would be that guy with a blog. I always looked at those people and thought, "Wow, they must have nothing better to do with their lives" (yes I'm very condiscending in my mind). But I've come to the point in my life where I'm doing a million things, I want to do a million more, and I need someplace to put all my thoughts, ramblings, and inventions or I'll explode (not literally, figuratively, although I could see where you would be confused because people say 'literally' now instead of figuratively so it literally means figuratively). But I digress. Although that is a fantastic example of exploding if I don't get all my thoughts out of my head! :) Being my first post and all, I'll spare the world my novel-esk writing style and keep it simple. Goodbye.
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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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