Edge Quest

I love fencing. I love board games. Wouldn't I love a fencing board game?

Well...

Enter Edge Quest, coming soon to Kickstarter. It's got cards, dice, and all that board-gamey goodness, but there are also fully articulated action figures representing the fencers. Awesome in principle, but can you imagine having to stop play to adjust the arm and leg positions of both fencers with every thrust, parry, riposte, and whatnot? Fencing is fast, but the manipulation of the figure seems like it would make for an agonizingly slow game experience. I'd be up for static miniatures that enable players to show the position of their fencers on the game board (especially if the arena is more diverse than a simple fencing strip), but fiddling around with the figures seems kind of ridiculous.

Holiday Fun

We're enjoying some downtime this week, basically just bumming around and playing with Christmas presents. One one of the kids' big gifts this year was Hockey Sauce, and although Matthew and I both consider ourselves pretty accurate shooters, I have to admit that we need to hone our skillz!

On the indoor gaming front, we've enjoyed a few memorable rounds of Butts in Space and are now poring over the contents of Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps. It's a bit like AVP, but without the "P". I suspect we'll mainly use the components to enhance our Alien RPG gameplay experience in the next campaign. I've also tried introducing the boys to the second edition of Pathfinder, without much success; they're ho-hum about a system that's like D&D but not actually D&D. 

Finally, Nathaniel got a full set of fencing gear for Christmas, so here are a couple of photos of us in action!

Tourney

This post is kind of off-topic, but damn it -- I'm going to share it anyway!

The local fencing group that I'm part of, DCCSC Fencing, held its first-ever tournament on Saturday. Our students are teenagers who are relatively new to the sport (some have been fencing for as little as two months, with no one having more than about a year's worth of experience), but they did very well against fencers from other clubs who were often older and almost invariably had more experience. I'm really proud of these kids!

DCCSC Fencing

Hooray for Peyton! Anway...our fencing club now has a Facebook page! Douglas County Community & Senior Center (yikes, that's a mouthful!) Fencing, or DCCSC Fencing, can be found here.

Back on the Strip!

We had fencing last night for the first time in over three months because the leader of the program had been recovering from an injury. During that hiatus, I submitted the necessary paperwork to become an instructor at the local community center that hosts our fencing group. I think (I hope!) that process is nearing completion, so now our fledgling club will have two instructors for classical foil fencing, and I'll be able to step in whenever the leader of the program is unable to teach. I haven't taught fencing classes since Colgate, so I'm looking forward to it!

What's New?

Not much gaming news to report these days. The guys in the online group (Kevin, Scott, and Tim W) are coming to the end of their Shattered Realm mini-campaign and will be returning to Druid Cycle action thereafter. Otherwise, it's been pretty quiet. I've used the extra time to start reading up on the instruction of fencing, as I hope to get into coaching again at some point.

Progress!

Strong showing last night against the local instructor in my first-ever bout against him. My comeback is going in the right direction!

Week Two

Week two of my return to fencing went well. Most of the folks who showed up for the "free play" night were historical fencers (lots of walking around in circles -- I don't quite get it), so they did their own thing while I worked one-on-one with a young classical fencer. It was a combination of drills and sparring, as much for my benefit as hers. I still have a long way to go before I get my precision and endurance back, but it was a good step forward. Give me a few more months and I'll be ready to take on Aldo Nadi himself -- of course, it helps that he's been dead for fifty years!

Bring on the Fun (and Pulled Muscles)!

My new fencing gear arrived today! Check it out...

I picked up an epee (the one with the thicker blade and the larger guard) as well as a foil because I think I'd gravitate toward epee if I ever got back into competitive fencing. Foil has all those wacky right-of-way rules, but epee is as simple as it gets -- whoever hits first gets the point, and the entire body is a valid target. Now I just need to convince someone at our local club to give epee a try...

Etes-vous prets? Allez!

Well, I'm officially back into fencing now. This is a blog about gaming, of course, and fencing isn't exactly a core topic here -- but then again, neither is Hawkman. So, etes-vous prets? Ready or not, here comes a post about fencing!

Though I haven't been involved with the sport for as long as I've been involved with D&D (the latter has about a five-year head start), it's been a part of my life since childhood. I fenced for fun, I fenced competitively, and I even did a bit of instruction when I got to college and there wasn't an existing fencing program. After college, though, came graduate school and various part-time jobs, and research, and teaching...fencing just kind of fell by the wayside. For a long while, for many years, I didn't miss it. 

Then I did. 

Earlier this summer, I got back in touch with my old fencing coaches, a couple of guys I hadn't seen or spoken to in about fifteen years. During our family's recent visit to New York, Matthew and I dropped by one of their practices. It was great to reconnect with those guys, and by the end of the session I knew that my interest in the sport had been rekindled. I found a couple of fencing clubs in Reno -- an hour's drive from my house -- but then a nascent group emerged at the local community center, no more than five minutes from home. Last night I joined them for a bit of sparring, and although I've got fifteen years' worth of rust to shake off, and I'm fifteen years older now, and I had nowhere near the endurance or the precision of motion that I had in my prime -- I did okay. More importantly, it was fun. Next Thursday can't come fast enough!

Force Friday

It's Force Friday, so I stopped by my local Target this morning to take a peek. There was indeed more Star Wars stuff than you could shake a lightsaber at. However, I'm soon to invest a lot of money in new fencing gear -- taking up an activity I abandoned many years ago -- so I resisted the urge to grab the new Lego Millennium Falcon and X-Wing sets. (Christmas is coming, boys!) I was pleasantly surprised to find the new Force Awakens-themed core set for the X-Wing miniatures game, with new pilot cards and upgrade cards, and new paint schemes to correspond to the ships' appearance in the upcoming film. I already have two of the original core sets, though, so the likes of Poe Dameron and BB-8 will have to remain a mystery to me until some Rebel (now Resistance?) player fields those cards against me someday...