Obsessive gaming - eh?

Well, yeah it's been a long time since I've updated this nonsense.

I've got some new obsessions lately - things distracting me from the mundane. The car is still high on the list. I've managed to track it at least once a month since May and have been having an absolute BLAST in the process. As usual, the GruppeB support has been instrumental to my enjoyment. Since I last wrote, the blue car now sports an roll bar (bright yellow - natch), full blown racing seat and some well-worn tires.

But wait, I'm not going to write about the car this time - yes, it's true. I'll start writing again now and will do an update (or two) about the car soon.

What else to quickly go over...

The twins are now well into there three year old independence phase. It's a riot; they carry on conversations with each other that can often times be full-on belly laughable, and other times heartbreaking. What a pair.

Max, on the otherhand, has turned into a six year old teenager. ATTITUDE - all caps - all the time. He's a riot in other ways...

Finally, the biggest news (and the main portion of this entry) is that I've rediscovered a hex based wargame I tried playing 20 years ago titled "Advanced Squad Leader". ASL is a squad level, tactical wargame which depicts warfare during the second world war. It captures the nitty-gritty "in close" fighting which is portrayed in the movies - very tense and very personal. I've owned this game for years, but never found anyone to play it with.

I haven't opened this up on the blog yet - but one of my deep dark secrets is that I'm a gamer. I loves the games; board games, computers games, role-playing, console, I'll try anything once. One interesting by-product of this love for games is an obsession with rules. I read rule books for fun. While Amy will sit in bed reading the latest best-seller, I'm snuggled up with a rule book from some game I recently purchased or found online. Nevermind that I may never PLAY the game, I'll just read the rules.

The initial set of rules for ASL measure in at probably over 80 pages.

Nirvana.

The reason ASL came back to the surface for me with the discovery of VASL. VASL (Virtual Advanced Squad Leader) is a java program which allows one to play ASL over the internet in either a "live" context, or via email. It is a miracle. The screen shot at the end of this post was made with that program. The biggest benefits are being able to play anyone (VASL is free) at any time, and being able to log the games to play via email (a typical ASL game played 'live' takes hours - sometimes days).

So I 'meet' some people on an ASL forum who are willing to teach me the ins-and-outs of ASL in the internet age. One guy turns out to be a perfect fit for me - a couple of (sub)turns a day average, patient, and a good player to boot (well, at least better than me - which isn't saying much at the moment). Plus he has a good sense of humour and doesn't seem to take this too seriously.

Another thing which he enjoys doing is writing "After Action Reports" (AARs) which are basically a turn-by-turn accounting of a given game.

No. Really. Not only do we play a given scenario, there are people (careful - I'm turning into one of them!) who then write up the details of that particular play session and make it available for other gamer types to read.

They
Are
Very
Interesting

In fact, I find reading AARs almost as interesting as playing the game itself - there is certainly a lot of strategy and rule interpretations to be discovered within those pages.

So, anyway, Dale (my new found ASL mentor) wants to publish our games. He needed some help on setting up tables and whatnot. So I pepared this for him - beware, non-game types turn away now - severe boredom ahead.

Here ya go Dale:

Event	Action	DRM	DR	Result
G1 PF
1	J3 (16) prep fire at J5	+3	3,6	NE
2	L2 (12) prep fire at J5	+2	6,4	NE
3	C7 (20) prep fire at E9	+1	4,3	2MC
4	E9 426 2MC	-	2,5	Break
G1 M
5	D6 467 am to D7
6	D6 467/DC am to D7
7	D6 8-1, 548 am to D7
G1 AF
8	D7 (8) af at E9	+2	2,2	1MC
9	E9 broken 426 1MC	-	6,3	Replace
G1 Rt
10	E9 broken 226 rout to F8-G9-H8
G1 A
11	D7 467 advance to E8
12	D7 467/DC advance to E8
13	D7 8-1, 548 advance to E8
14	C7 548/LMG advance to D7
15	C7 467/LMG advance to D7
16	C7 9-2, 548 advance to D7