Focus on the Wrong Targets

I’ll cut past the ‘hello, is this thing on’ and just straight up apologise – Sorry I’ve not written anything here for a while. Today, I’ll be blaming this on two things. Firstly, I’ve managed to accidentally nuke a few draft posts that were ‘in process’ – this was pretty stupid. Secondly, I’ve been failing in my mission. Or at least half failing, but failing in the fun half. Succeeding in the dull half is not really succeeding at all.

The mission is ‘Play More, Spend Less’. And I’ve been hardly playing at all. A couple of games of Warhammer Invasion when I can squeeze them in, and a short RuneQuest campaign I participated in. Though I’ve tried to plan a games evening (I have held one of the four I intended to by this time in the year), I’m trying to use it to get people round to visit who don’t normally come – so this too, is failing. I can blame a lot of things (increased demands on time, trying to make one games night do multiple things, etc etc) but ultimately, it’s down to me not setting aside time to play games.

I have managed to save money by not buying new things – indeed, selling off all of my old Star Trek CCG cards has allowed me to grab a new television – but that’s not exactly fun. It’s nice, once I got past the hoarder’s natural instinct of “But that’s my stuff!” but it’s not exactly fun. Certainly not as fun as playing games, which is why we’re all here.

This all came to a head this week when, on a rare day off work, I was told by my wife in a games store “It doesn’t matter how much that rulebook is – would you play it, since we don’t play the other games as it is?”

This hit me like a brick. For one thing, it’s a really nice rulebook. Heavy, hardcover, bionics and spaceship battles. What more could you want? Well, the time to play it, obviously, and the blessing of She Who Must Be Obeyed. It was at that moment that I realised that spending less on games was the trivial part of the frugal gamer’s mission – the gaming more part was actually, counter-intuitively, the harder part!

Despite the busy social schedule for the next couple of months, I’m going to try to remedy this by scheduling some roleplaying games in to kick life back into a long-left WFRP game. I’ll also try to sneak some zombie-themed games into a zombie-themed movie evening (to celebrate the new telly).

Hopefully, between planning games, playing games, and the other commitments which prevent the other two I’ll have some time to at least write some game reviews to put up here. Wish me luck!