Visions of G&G XII

Earlier this month, I joined my G&G brethren in celebrating the twelfth (!) annual Gaming & Guinness gathering. By now, anyone who follows this blog knows the drill: once a year, I meet with some old buddies and we play games and drink Guinness (well, most of us; Scott and I are teetotallers). Every year is special in its own way, and this time around three highlights stand out: the swag, the group photo concept, and my successful attempt to make X-Wing more efficient.

You can see the swag above: Island Mike and Rob collaborated to mint challenge coins for the group. Not only are they quite handsome works of art, they bring the challenge coin tradition to G&G; for those unawares, members of any challenge coin group are meant to carry their coin at all times. If you run into another member of the group, you can challenge that person to present their coin; if they don't have it with them, they need to buy you a drink (or perform another service of similar value). If they meet your challenge, you buy them a round, and so on.

Jeff came up with the idea of staging a photo that presents us as a bunch of back-alley gamblers.

Since we were all wearing our jerseys from last year, we took the opportunity to shoot them from the rear:

As for X-Wing, I learned from last year's mistake of having everyone take the time to custom-build their own fleets. It's fun in principle, but it adds at least an hour of preparation to the game. I avoided that this time by pre-building ship options and limiting ship choices to those few that were to be used in the scenario I developed, which pitted a squad of basic TIE fighters and a Firespray against a hodgepodge Rebel fleet trying to get away with a stolen TIE fighter and a freighter full of defectors. The Imperials won this particular engagement, and the game flew by quite quickly. Lesson learned!

And now, some selected photographic highlights from the festivities...

Congratulations to Steve for winning Circvs Maximvs for the first time, and to Jeff and Scott for reaching the podium. And thanks to Mike for hosting!