At the Quarter Mark

My pre-NHL hockey league currently has a twelve-game regular season, with each team playing four games (two home, two away) against the other three teams. At this point, I've played through three full games for each team. As we're now at the one-quarter mark of the regular season, I thought it would be interesting to take stock of how things are shaping up.

The standings look much like last season. The Vics are on top at 2-0-1, the Bulldogs are next at 1-1-1, and the Comets and Thistles are both at 0-1-2. Although the average number of goals per game is up by only fifteen-hundreds of a goal, it feels like there's more scoring this time around. To wit, we saw only two regular-season hat tricks all of last year (Cyclone Taylor and Harry Trihey), but we've already matched that number (Frank Rankin and Gord Roberts) after just a handful of games. Taylor laps the field in scoring with a ridiculous 12 points (4 goals, 8 assists), which is double the number of the three men who are tied for second place with 6 apiece. The other remarkable individual performance in the early going of Season 2 is the goaltending of the Comets' Percy LeSueur; despite playing on a vastly inferior team, he's putting up numbers that rival the Vics' Bowse Hutton. If he keeps it up and the Comets find their scoring touch, they could really surprise us as we get deeper into the season.

Season 2 Begins!

Being sick sucks, especially since I can't play with the boys or do any transcontinental D&D with our Toronto crew, but one thing I can do -- even with a wretchedly sore throat and hacking cough -- is play Strat-O-Matic hockey!

We opened the new season with the Vics at home to raise their Season 1 championship banner. Their opponents? The Bulldogs, the very team they defeated to win that championship. The Bulldogs, meanwhile, were looking for payback. Early in the first, the Dogs jumped out in front when Tom Hooper beat Bowse Hutton. It took the Vics a moment to find their footing, but they tied the game shortly thereafter on a Billy McGimsie strike. Frank Rankin then scored twice in the first half of the second period to give the Vics a 3-1 lead, with Cyclone Taylor assisting on all three tallies. Defenseman-turned-forward Harry Watson scored for the Dogs to pull within one, but Taylor picked up two quick goals late in the second. Going into the third, it was 5-2 in favor of the Vics, but the Dogs came out shooting in the third. Their lousy luck continued, however, when winger George Richardson was injured in the opening moments of the period. He's likely going to miss several games, so the Dogs' depth will be tested early in the season. With Hooper and star winger Gord Roberts double-shifting for the rest of the game, the Dogs tried in vain to get back into this one. Rankin completed his hat trick late in the third, and the Vics skated away with a 6-2 triumph.

The Last God

DC and D&D -- together again! I have no idea what this is, but I will probably check it out.

KOTOR on TV?

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool DC guy, so I have to admit that Disney+, with its upcoming slate of Marvel series, doesn't hold much appeal for me. Thus far, I've considered myself happy to wait for whatever streaming service Warner Brothers ultimately rolls out, but if rumors are true that Disney+ is developing a Knights of the Old Republic television series, I might need to rethink my streaming strategy. Then again, rumors of a KOTOR feature film didn't exactly pan out...

Handy-Dandy Dungeon Maps

Speaking of Kickstarter, we received our copy of The Dungeon today!

It's a two-volume set, and each book is chock-full of maps for use with D&D or any sort of game involving miniatures that fit on a one-inch grid. Shown below are two examples of individual pages, but you can also lay the book open for a double-sized map.

Additionally, by laying the two volumes next to each other, you can create larger maps in a square shape, or in other configurations. Great stuff!

So beautiful...

...but so expensive! Return to Dark Tower looks magnificent, but hard to justify even at the base pledge level ($125) that gets you a copy of the game. And with delivery more than a year away, I think I'll probably sit this one out.

Adepta Sororitas

I think I need to start working on a new army...

Return to Dark Tower

I missed out on their Fireball Island Kickstarter, but now Restoration Games is working on Return to Dark Tower, and I'm already drooling. I haven't seen anything about pricing yet, but damn, I really need to back this project!

(Side note: If you look back four years on this very blog, you'll find a post where I referenced the original Dark Tower board game and its classic Orson Welles television commercial, and how the game was in need of a comeback!)

Player Eligibility Revisited

After further reflection, I'm sticking with my original player eligibility parameters for the time being. This is a league for pre-modern, non-NHL Hall of Famers. For the upcoming second season, we'll keep the same set of players that we had in Season 1, but we'll introduce a couple of new free agents, Moose Goheen and Phat Wilson -- two guys I had, at first, deemed too recent to include. Goheen and Wilson project as solid regulars and not fringe players like the other free agents, so I think I'll need turn back the clock and redo the transactions that the teams completed after the conclusion of Season 1. With Goheen and Wilson in the mix, teams like the Thistles and Comets have an opportunity to add impact players to their talent pool and not settle for marginal upgrades. Later, perhaps after the conclusion of Season 2, I'll consider adding early NHL-era players like Art Ross and Joe Hall, especially if it seems like an expansion team would be a fun twist for the league. Okay, enough second-guessing and hand-wringing!

Player Eligibility

Over the holidays, I've enjoyed reading Bob Duff's The First Season, a comprehensive account of the very first NHL season, conducted in the winter of 1917-18. It got me thinking about the player eligibility rules I set up for my Strat-O-Matic hockey league. At the present time, I'm using only players who did not play in the NHL and whose careers were, essentially, pre-NHL. (As such, I'm not including players like Vladislav Tretiak -- those who did not play in the NHL but played concurrently with that league.) Given the complexity of amateur and professional options for elite hockey players in that formative era of the 1900s and 1910s, I've had to make some judgment calls on which players are part of my pool. Rightly or wrongly, Harry Watson (the first one) is in and Moose Goheen is out, but I could go either way on some of those borderline cases. In reading The First Season, however, I've realized that quite a few legendary hockey players finished out their storied careers during that inaugural season. Should I really be excluding the likes of Art Ross, Harry Hyland, and Jack Laviolette just because they played out the string in the NHL's first season? Or what about Russell "Barney" Stanley, who suited up for just one NHL game in his entire career? I'll need to ruminate further prior to the start of Season 2.

2020!

Happy New Year, folks! It's 2020 already. Can you believe it?

Everyone is already talking about "20/20 vision" and "20/20 hindsight" and all that, but when I see this year written out, what I see is two rolls of 20 on a D20. With a 1-in-400 chance of occurring, two 20s is a rare and often game-changing event. In the annals of Druid Cycle lore, for instance, I still recall those epic moments when Jason -- the mighty Sir Roberts -- would roll critical hits on two straight attacks and turn the tide of battle. These days, it seems to be Nathaniel who's been blessed by the dice gods with a knack of rolling 20s, as his Shattered Realm hero Demorus is known for coming through in the clutch.

Here's to a great 2020, and I hope this is a year of double crits for you and yours!