BGTG 135 - Boardgaming Road Trip (with Dave Arnott)

Have you ever gone a boardgaming road trip? I expect quite a few people might drive a few hundred miles to go to a game convention, but I've never done that. Games Days on Saturdays are local for me, about the same hour's drive I do on my daily commute. Recently, though, my buddy Dave Arnott drove the two of us halfway up California to spend a weekend of games, food, and conversation with other gamer friends. That was different, and a complete blast!

This is sort of like a session report show--remember when I did those? The podcast goes a little long, but that's because we were having fun talking about games on the drive back. That's right, we recorded the podcast about the road trip while we were still on the road trip. Vroom!

We got to play a whole lot of great games: a few new ones and several more old favorites. Jeff Myers is working his way through Spiel des Jahres winners on his blog, [url=http://gameguythinks.com/mississippi-queen/]Gameguythinks[/url], so we made sure to play a couple more of those classic titles, [thing=256][/thing] and [thing=54][/thing]. Other old faves we played were [thing=1315][/thing], [thing=73][/thing], [thing=261][/thing] (1994!), and [thing=5306][/thing] (1962!). The newer ones were [thing=123260][/thing] and [thing=103185][/thing]. I'll cheat a little and include [thing=357][/thing], too, since there was a recent reprint. In between is [thing=40769][/thing], which seems to have slipped past people but is really pretty great. Has EnderWiggin does one of his awesome photo-reviews of Valdora? Seems right up his alley.

Besides the boardgames, we get to tell a couple side stories. We stopped at a thrift store where I grabbed a few bargains (or not--you tell me). Another of Dave's hobbies is [url=http://www.letterboxing.org/]Letterboxing[/url], which is described as "an intriguing pastime combining navigational skills and rubber stamp artistry in a charming 'treasure hunt' style outdoor quest." Perfect for a road trip! We did that, and we also got to stop at the warehouse for wargame publisher Decision Games. I picked up a couple items in-person, but also had the fun of seeing what goes on at the publisher of Strategy & Tactics, as well as many good wargames.