International Tabletop Day - Better Late Than Never!

One of my Google+ friends posted a notice a few months ago about International Tabletop Day. Having played a lot of games over the years with my fellow students, co-workers, siblings and children, I decided to use this as motivation/excuse to dig out one of my games and play it with my son. A lot of my games are buried away in boxes and some of the ones that are accessible take a long time to play.

But, I was able to find a couple starter packs for the original Star Wars trading card game. So, I dug them out and opened them up to enjoy with my son.

Like most kids in the 90's, my kids played several of these games, especially Pokemon. But, I particularly enjoyed playing the Star Wars game and the Lord of the Rings game that came out later. Star Wars is a one-on-one game, but I particularly enjoyed it because you could build customized decks for different locations and sets of characters. This gave each deck a special set of possible strategies for winning and made it interesting to pit them against each other. The game could however take a lot of space for all the locations in play and, if there wasn't a good match up between the decks, it could turn into shadow-boxing with the sides never directly confronting each other.

The LOTR game was more suitable for a small group since multiple players could play at once. The strategy was more of a race to get to the final location first, assuming your ring-bearer survived!

And, the rules for these became quite extensive and I paid for a lot of library printouts to keep up with the changes since I didn't have an internet-capable computer at the time.

But, for this fun session, we just used the basic rules that came with the game decks and fumbled our way through!

My son played the Light Side while I played the Dark Side!

We fumbled around, made some mistakes, gradually figured out the main rules and just had some fun together. It was a close finish, but I won.

Today was back to studying as we move into the last week of class work and then Finals Week!

Do any of you still have any collectible card games?

Are there any other tabletop games you particularly like?

Thanks to all of you who stop in and check out my musings.