August's Gaming - A look back.

My gaming time is exclusively Friday nights at the moment.

During August I managed to play the following games over 3 sessions of gaming.

The Resistance twice.
Played it wrong the first time (which seems to be a pattern!) but got it mostly right the second time.
Excellent game and definitely has great roleplaying possibilities as well as acting as a simple bluffing game.

Sentinels Of The Multiverse twice.
First time with all of the expansions and some heroes getting their first outing.  Excellent fun as ever and great to introduce someone else to the game.

D&D Next once plus a character creation session.
I've posted elsewhere on this but I'm starting to look forward to the next playtest packet if only because it will be the last before the final game is released (likely) next year.

Bang! once.
The rules are so badly translated but once you work your way around them and increase your understanding it really is a fun game.  I seem to die most games so need to work on not having that happen!

So that's 3 sessions of gaming with 6 games played + 1 character creation session.  Not bad.

What do I take from that?  Board Games are very very adaptable to multiple plays in 1 night. Obviously that's down to the board game but being able to fill available time by playing a board game is a great thing.

The Resistance and Bang! in particular are really great as pickup games for large groups of players but Sentinels remains at the forefront of the board/card gaming section of this 2nd Chapter.

Plan for September

I'm going to try and do this every month.  Main reason is so that I can track my progress against those objectives I set.

So gaming plans for September are as follows -

Friday 6th
The second session of the D&D Next Playtest.  We'll finish off the scenario I ran the last time and I'll probably have to expand on it a little as the players were near the end.
Something of a frustration though is that there's a new (and apparently final) playtest packet coming out in mid September.  It's only a frustration because I've only just started to play the game and I suspect that the next packet will have some fairly big changes.
On the plus side though it looks like it will add some setting flavour into the game beyond the "core" races from Forgotten Realms/Greyhawk.  Kender (Dragonlance) and Warforged (Eberron) will be introduced into the next pack which if nothing else will bring with it some new options for players. Unfortunately though my player base don't know those settings, certainly not Dragonlance at any rate. Still it will give more options to the group as a whole and given this is supposed to the final playtest packet it will mean I can build a short "campaign" off the back of it.

Friday 13th
Oooo spooky!  Board Game night.
Want this to be focussed on games I haven't played much or at all since buying so Seasons, Pandemic and probably The Resistance.  We shall see though as I'll need to see what the rest of the players want to play.

Friday 20th
I suspect this will be more D&D Next.  At the moment I'll be sticking to the "one and done" approach for scenarios, at least until the next packet is out.

Friday 27th
Combination of Star Wars EotE character creation and more board gaming I suspect.

Now as you'll have noticed this plan is predicting that I game 4 weeks in a row.  That's my intention for September.
Also this only shows gaming on a Friday.  I'm currently looking at options to play on other nights whether that be weeknights or weekends is still up for debate but I'm keen to introduce even a once a month alternate slot for gaming and if I can't achieve that in September I want to make sure it's in place for October.

Gamers Guide to London?

I'm going to London in October for a week's holiday with my family and it got me thinking about how there are travel guides for practically everything these days.

That got me thinking.  Why isn't there a "gamers guide to <insert city>" out there?  Not even a blog or series of blogs that gives you the lowdown on what shops to visit, clubs to attend or anything like that.

Now I know there are lists of shops on various websites and lists of clubs too but I find it a bit odd that even a "Geeks Guide" type website doesn't exist.

So London, what do you have for me?

Store wise I know of 2.

The Orcs Nest - http://www.orcsnest.com/ - I've been before whilst on a business trip and it's a well stocked shop if restricted by it's relatively small size.  I wasn't expecting it to be palatial or anything but it was smaller than I'd hoped.  But then again it is pretty much in central London so no doubt their overheads won't be small.  I'll no doubt visit again in October if only to have a browse.

Leisure Games - https://www.leisuregames.com/ - Never been here but then again it's not central London which is normally where I go when in London for work.  This time though whilst the rest of my family are away doing stuff I won't (anything that involves being up high essentially!) I plan to take a trip out and who knows might end up buying something too.

Clubs?  There are several that I know of but on this occasion I'm not likely to be able to join in.  Maybe the next time I'm down with work...

Have I missed anything obviously gamer related in London?  If so, please let me know!