Force on Force, Saga and the inate beauty of the unexpected

For the past few weeks I was so focused on the projects I had lined up and I was trying really hard not to get sidetracked, however life is not so straight forward. 

My Friend Frank tells me that I am a butterfly when it comes to my attention span in regards to gaming (and pretty much on all my interests). That is fairly accurate on the surface, however I would call myself a true follower of the fundamental principles of chaos theory: amongst all the chaos there is spontaneous appearing order, what some scientists and mathematicians have called the innate beauty of the unexpected.

On a whim, I decided to participate in a Saga tournament at Huzzah Hobbies, my local shop. I had played the game extensively when it first came out a couple of years ago and like with many things people around the store began paying attention to other games with time and  we never revisited the game. With the recent release of their medieval volume, saga began attracting attention again, and new players. So my local shop started to run organized play in the form of mini tournaments. I had always enjoyed playing the game, and my warband —the Welsh—is one of the first 28mm figs armies that I painted, so even with painting mistakes and pools of dried superglue in their hands and spears I remain emotionally attached to them.So when the opportunity arose I went to the tournament...and I had a blast! I had so much fun! the group of people were just fun to play with and the game was as much fun as I remember playing. John, one of my friends that participated, played with a list that he scratch built representing the Knight who say "ni" from Monty python! it was great!

The Knights who say "ni"

So, after that, I went and re-read the books and checked the lists and bought a few more figures and I have a few warbands that I am working on now, since I want to play the game at least every time that a new local tournament comes up, but more on that later on.

Another event that occurred is that my friend Steve and I began playing regularly Force on Force. We had been getting together fairly regularly for the past couple of months on Sundays to play Heroes over Normandie (great game by the way!), and we decided to give Force on Force a try, and I can say that we have had very intense, interesting and entertaining sessions! that game is definitely one of my favourites! we began by playing the intro scenario that Ambush alley games has, and then we tried the first scenario from the rule book, and now we have been playing scenarios from the Enduring Freedom companion book, which is the Afghanistan campaign book.
Steve has been very generously providing  the terrain and the figures and it has been just great!

Last couple of weeks we have been playing operation Mutay 1 and 2 from the Enduring freedom book, I have been playing the Brits and he has been playing the Taliban (in the past scenarios he was playing the Marines and I was playing the insurgents).  here are some pics: 

 Once we get on a roll, I will post a game report, as for now we are mostly concentrating in understanding the game play and just having fun. I have gotten so into playing Force and Force that I started to build some forces for it that I always wanted to build, like Russians and Chechens, and The participants in the African Bush wars of the 60's, 70's and 80's (the wars in the Belgian Congo, Rhodesia, Angola and South Africa). So for the moment I am having a great time with unexpected games and its been very rewarding!

I have not left Art de la Guerre or By fire and the Sword on the side, I am still putting armies together for them, in fact next time I write I intend to write about my Muscovites for By fire and the Sword and / or the armies that I am putting together for ADLG. I also expect to play some Muskets and tomahawks periodically and hope to run demos for Land of the free before the summer is over. It just seems that I have been able to find and regularly play, by complete chance, rule systems that I wanted to play for a long time but that the opportunity had not presented itself.

So I learned that by leaving my self open for random occurrences, I was able to jump on this unexpected wave and have a great time.....

Lets see what the future brings next.