Expansion Issues

Matthew is really getting into Strat-O-Matic, which is fantastic except that it's further pushing out the return of our space-age Shattered Realm campaign. I've sunk a considerable amount of time and money (for minis, maps, etc.) into that game, so I hope we don't lose momentum. Still, it's great to see Matthew's enthusiasm for something baseball related, as he's been rather cool on that sport for many years.

At Matthew's request, we're going to divide up the remaining Hall of Famers to create two more teams for our league of legendary baseball stars. That would give us seven teams in all -- each with a full 25-man roster and a pool of reserve players. The problem with using all the players, however, is that the Hall of Famers are not evenly distributed across history. The early and modern periods are considerably underrepresented when compared to players from the '20s through the '40s -- especially when Hall of Famers from the Negro Leagues are included. Building balanced teams would be a snap if we were using an open draft of all Hall of Fame players, but I'm not quite sure how to deal with this problem in a league where the team rosters are determined by discrete twenty-year time periods. I'll try not to overthink it; the main thing is just for the three of us to have fun and for the boys to learn about the richness of baseball history. We'll figure something out!

Big Train's Big Hit

An epic battle of Tanks ended prematurely when Nathaniel flipped out at his (perceived) bad luck on dice rolls, so we shifted gears and introduced Matthew to Strat-O-Matic. His team, the Montreal Comets, faced off against Mickey Mantle's Chicago Magnificos. In a nail-biter of a pitcher's duel, Montreal's Walter "The Big Train" Johnson edged Bob Gibson by a 2-1 margin. By far the most memorable moment of the game occurred when Johnson homered off of Gibson to aid his cause.

What a Load!

I have no idea whether or not Pathfinder: Kingmaker is a good game -- mainly because the game took forever to load. The first few times I tried to launch it, I thought the game had actually frozen on the loading screen because the progress bar refused to budge. Only after a bit of frustrated googling did I learn that the load time for this game is just crazy long. Once I was finally in the game, I used up the rest of my time creating a character, so I still have yet to experience any of the story. Hopefully better luck tonight!

King Me!

Ages ago I backed a Kickstarter video game called Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and today it releases! 

Ouch!

Tough day for Rochester! Not only did we drop a 6-5 heartbreaker to Nathaniel's New York Gothams, we lost starting center fielder Hugh Duffy to a long-term injury. Duffy is an elite defender in center, he hits for good average and decent power, and he's got major wheels. I can slide Big Ed Delahanty from left to center and then add a solid corner bat in Sam Thompson, but Duffy's versatility will be missed. 

Expansion Team

Turns out I really enjoy building 25-man rosters chuck-full of Hall of Famers! I've now added a fifth team to our Hall of Fame league -- the Chicago Magnificos, comprised of players debuting between 1950 and 1971. They've got Koufax, Seaver, and Gibson on their pitching staff and the two-three-four hitters are Mays, Mantle, and Hammerin' Hank himself. Yikes!

Hall of Fame League

I think our Strat-O-Matic Hall of Fame League is ready to rock and roll! I ended up adding a fourth team that we can use as an opponent for solo play or as a team that guest players can use. Here are the four clubs:

• Montreal Comets (Matthew) -- Players debuting 1891-1910
• New York Gothams (Nathaniel) -- Players debuting 1911-1930
• Rochester Lilacs (John) -- Players debuting 1871-1890
• Washington Monuments (N/A) -- Players debuting 1931-1950

Yes, "Lilacs" is totally a goofy name for a baseball team, but I'm keeping with the theme of nineteenth-century baseball, when teams often had wacky names. Heck, the Dodgers were once known as the Bridegrooms and then later as the Superbas, so why not a team called the Lilacs?! Just imagine the uniforms! Okay, let's not imagine the uniforms...

Anyway, tonight I ran a solo game to kick things off, with my Lilacs facing the Monuments. The first at-bat featured Jackie Robinson against Cy Young. I honestly felt some genuine jitters as I rolled the dice. Robinson drew a walk off of Young, and the game was underway! The Flower City boys rallied from an early 0-3 deficit to win 8-5, surviving two homers from Ted Williams and one from Joe DiMaggio. King Kelly and Deacon White -- who grew up a stone's throw away from my hometown of Horseheads, NY -- delivered the big hits for Rochester.

I'll recap the game tomorrow for the boys and hopefully they'll be eager to jump into the action -- if, that is, I can tear them away from Tanks...

Tanks: The Modern Age

It was only a matter of time.

Gale Force 9 is getting ready to rock our world with Tanks: The Modern Age, a game that brings the action of Tanks into the Cold War era. The boys are going to flip out when I tell them this game is just a month away from release!

However, I hope the rules will be backwards-compatible with the original game, as just yesterday the boys played an Amazon order for some WWII American and German reinforcements...

The Old-Old Timers

It's time to take our Strat-O-Matic play to the next level. I'm creating a Hall of Fame League and dividing up the players according to time period. I'll be controlling the players from the earliest days of baseball (those debuting between 1871 and 1890), Matthew will take the Dead Ball era guys (1891-1910), and Nathaniel will get the players of the Live Ball era (1911-1930). If we end up needing more teams, we still have all the players who started their careers after 1930.

The boys have yet to decide on their rosters (although Nathaniel has already stated that Ruth and Gehrig will be batting third and fourth in his lineup), but mine was easy enough. I had only 27 players from my time period, so it was a matter of cutting two of them to get to a 25-man roster. I have an abundance of first basemen and outfielders but a dearth of pitchers -- just 10, in fact. Here's hoping the Strat-O-Matic versions of Cy Young, Kid Nichols, and Tim Keefe can eat up innings as well as their namesakes!

Pershing Hunt

We're back to Tanks this weekend, and Nathaniel decided he was going to load up a single Super Pershing with an elite crew of heroes and upgrade cards. He's now driving all over France while Matthew's German tanks are trying to track him down. Here's a cool shot of a Panzer ready to strike.

Not depicted in the photo, however, is the fact that the Panzer's engine is on fire, having just been hit by a shell from Nathaniel's Pershing!

Great Weekend

Surprisingly, we didn't have anything major on the calendar this past weekend, so it was a perfect opportunity to spend time gaming with the boys. We made great progress on our new futuristic Shattered Realm campaign, started up a gigantic X-Wing battle (the boys are captaining a couple of very large Imperial ships, opposed by swarms of Rebel fighters under my command), and played a couple of Strat-O-Matic baseball games with Nathaniel. I really cherish these quiet times together!

Happy Birthday, I Guess?

A package arrived at our doorstep this afternoon, and I suspected it was the full version of Strat-O-Matic baseball, which I had ordered for Nathaniel for his birthday. Now, every other box that comes from Amazon arrives in their generic packaging, but for some reason, this box had "Strat-O-Matic" emblazoned in big red letters on the front of the box. Nathaniel immediately knew what it was and requested that we open it today -- more than two weeks before his actual birthday. Why force the kid (and me) to pine for it? So he ended up getting an early birthday present, and now we're deeply involved in lineup construction for our first game. We selected players randomly from across baseball history (this boxed set includes all 250+ players who are in the Hall of Fame), so it's quite an eclectic mix on each team. Nathaniel's guys are led by Ty Cobb, whereas my best player is Hank Greenberg. Tomorrow, it's game on!

Liftoff!

Over the past week the boys and I have managed to get started with our futuristic Shattered Realm campaign. They aren't taking it quite as seriously as I would like -- I did invest a lot of time and money into this setting, after all -- but hopefully things will settle down and we'll get into some solid roleplaying. I've designed this campaign as kind of a sandbox, so I'm curious to see which plot threads they'll pick up and which one's they'll defer or ignore. Here's to something very, very different from our usual adventures!

Strat-O-Tastic!

At long last, Nathaniel's personalized Strat-O-Matic card has arrived!

Sorry, Mom, but getting ready for bed just had to wait. First we needed to pore over the game stats to see how Nathaniel stacks up against our Strat-O-Matic teams filled with MLB All-Stars. Short answer: He's pretty damn good because we used Derek Jeter's MVP-worthy (he totally got jobbed) 1999 season as the basis for Nathaniel's stats. The kid can't wait to get this lil' slugger in the lineup tomorrow morning to see how he fares. I think I'm going to start Scherzer...