Running out of shelf-space is something that you will definitely run in to if you are an active Boardgamer. It is inevitable that you will, at some point, by that x+1th game that now no longer fits in the space you have. What to do? There are 2 obvious solutions : keep your collection fresh by getting rid of old or common games, don’t buy games everyone in your game club is also likely to own.
Previously I had mentioned BrettSpielWelt as a great way to play boardgames online. I neglected to talk about all the other forms of online gaming out there. This time I’d like to talk about VASSAL. VASSAL is a Java engine-based system for building, and playing board and card games.
As of this writing VASSAL is at version 3.1.14, is available for Windows, OSX, Linux, and has approaching 800 game modules. While early games ported in to Vassal often included scans of the mapboard and pieces, newer versions use high resolution files and custom graphics. Games are often now ported with the permission of the publishers: most notably GMT Games allows and supports many of their games for online play using Vassal.
In my quest to find games online that I can play with some frequency, I stumbled across an old Avalon Hill Classic called Victory in the Pacific.
The big hurdle, besides not owning a copy of the game (yet), was that the map is so awful by today’s standards. I think if I’d played this game back in the early 1980s when it was still new I wouldn’t feel that way, but that’s not the case. In addition, I needed another small project to fill some time.
One of the challenges of painting miniatures is going back to add to a set you’ve painted a long time ago. It can be very hard to remember which paint manufacturer, let alone which shade, was used for a given model. I’ll never be able to replicate the paint job on more models than I care to name, all because I didn’t have a system in place. When I started out I just didn’t think about the need to possibly repair or add to models later on.
Once I realized I was going to be in this hobby for the long haul I decided on developing a system for recalling what paints I had used on what models. After some trial and error I opted for the following system:
If you love Eurogames and are not familiar with BrettSpielWelt than you should be. BrettSpielWelt (or BSW) is a free online portal and application for playing many of the most popular board and card games available today. It can be intimidating at first because BSW is primarily in German, but people of all languages populate the site and help and translations abound.
BSW covers game from the very popular Carcassonne (Game, BGG , BSW) or Settlers of Catan (Game, BGG, BSW), to games popular with more dedicated boardgame enthusiasts like Power Grid (Game, BGG, BSW) and Imperial (Game, BGG, BSW).