Hi. This is not a review. Mostly. This is a rant, largely because I want to get my backstory of how I, a die-hard Euro fan, came into possession of a pure AT game. Feel free to skip the first part, I don't blame you. Just go down until you see a picture of the Doom box cover - it's the one picturing an ugly guy with bad oral hygiene leering behind big DOOM letters.
This post is LONG. Don't believe me? Scroll a little. See? LONG. It's so long you might have an actual game session of Doom:the boardgame in the time it will take you to read this.
You have been warned. So let's begin.
It all started around 20 years ago. Perhaps more. I wasn't a boardgame nut back then. I've played my share of Monopoly, and I've had in my closet a bunch of roll-and-move games, but mostly my indoor free time was tied to my beloved home computer - Commodore 64. Man, that machine had some great games. And unlike modern computer games, back then those oldies were much more social - it was a common thing for the kids to gather around in the same room and play the crap out of those games.
One of our favorite games was called Laser Squad and it looked something like this:
THAT game was the s**t. I can't even remember how many hours we spent playing it. It was a tactical turn-based game where you led your squadron of soldiers into an enemy base, trying to retrieve something, rescue someone or simply kill all opposition, depending on the scenario. The great thing was that you could play it in multiplayer where one player took the part of the good guys, the other was the bad guys and each had his turn (you could even play with more then two, team style, because your marines were named, so each player picked the guys he was gonna control and off you go). We simply couldn't get enough of it - original concept, fun weapons, traps, intense fights.. perhaps today it would all seem primitive, but trust me, back then this was really hot stuff. 52
(Btw, one of subsequent games who drew its inspiration heavily from Laser Squad was the uberpopular X:COM - Enemy Uknown, and if you haven't played THAT, shame on you).
But I digress. One day my friend called me up and said he got hold of a certain boardgame which he said was pure Laser Squad, but played with miniatures and dice instead of on the computer screen. "Real-life" Laser Squad? Woah. We were there as fast as our BMX bikes could carry us.We couldn't wait to see this wonder. And it was, of course:
Playing Space Crusade is one of my fondest childhood memories. Even though my friend had the game for only a few days, for those few days we couldn't get enough of it. We simply couldn't believe you could have so much fun with something that was a frikkin boardgame. And I don't even know how my friend got a hold of it - I think a friend of a friend got it from his dad who bought it when he was on business trip in UK or something, and that one single copy circulated everywhere through my home town. I do know that later on I tried getting a hold of it again, but the game was nowhere to be found. I wanted to buy my own copy but that was equally impossible. And remember, in those ancient pre-Google days, finding information about stuff was REALLY hard. In a year or so I could hardly remember how the game was called, a few years later only a vague memory remained, always re-discovered when I fired up my old copy of Laser Squad on my increasingly outdated C64.
Years pass, I go to college, boardgames being the furthest thing from my mind, what with all the booze, girls, parties and occasional exam in between. My C64 was lost in history, replaced with a battered PC I shared with my roommate. Actually, I didn't abstain completely from boardgames. There WAS a period when someone in my dorm discovered Risk and I even think we were really into it for a while, but it didn't last long. Fast forward, I graduate college, hello real life. One day on my way I notice "boardgame sales" in some shop I never cared to enter. I go inside and buy this weird game called "Settlers of Catan" which costed next to nothing. Well, this was a start of my new infatuation with boardgames. A few years later here I am with an admirable collection of various boardgames which got played quite a lot with my friends, almost all working folk as me who enjoyed this rather unusual kind of social activity. 52