Scimons Random Thought Table

In my youth I was a drug dealer. It wasn’t so bad really, it did wonders for my social life (and skills) and made me a very good living for a young man. See I was more a low level dealer, supplying the goods from my boss who gave me a cut of the profits.

I tried to be moral about it, I never dealt in school, restricting my actions to evenings and weekends but even then I was generally rushed of my feet as I had a serious group of people who couldn’t get enough of the wide range of drugs I was selling. Now if you listen to the media you’d expect my clientèle to be bunch of hoodie wearing youths, but you couldn’t be further from the truth. They were a selection of people from 18 to 80 who would travel, often for miles to partake. It was generally quite social, everyone was very relaxed most of the time, once in a while someone would maybe take too much or lose control but it didn’t happen that often. I have to admit I did also join in, dipping into my own supply on a regular basis with little or no thought on it’s effects on my body or mind.

Of course you realise I’m talking about that extremely addictive debilitating drug Alcohol, which as an 18 year old barman I sold in copious qualities to fine upstanding members of the community. I mention this because yesterday there was a torrent of outrage about the ‘legal high’ Mephadrone which has been linked to the death of two teenagers. Personally I find the whole thing indicative of our cultures utterly screwed up attitude towards Drugs. I really don’t get why we don’t legalise and licence them. Yes, drug addiction is bad and I’d rather people didn’t get addicted, but it’s their choice to do so. Surely it’s better for someone who has a drug habit to buy their drug from a licensed dealer who is under legal restrictions over what and to whom he can sell?

Of course people then jump in and scream ‘Think of the children!‘, I am. Firstly, if a drug is social acceptable (to a point) the desire to take it is lessened. Also if it’s licensed and restricted you can’t sell it to children, well of course you can but if the enforcement of laws on selling to minors was more vigorous there would be less issues. And the point is at some point a child is no longer a child but an adult, at which point they need to be able to make and accept their own mistakes. The more you smother someone and try and protect them from life the more they will try and rebel.

One problem with our current stance on drugs is because of it’s illogic and confusion it is ignored by kids. Trying to demonise everything in sight merely makes us (I have to find myself in the group of adults now I guess) look stupid and makes anything we say on the matter worthless. We need a rational adult debate on the subject of drugs and how to handle them.

So I spent a good chunk of this weekend playing Civilization, please note that’s not Civilization which I firmly expect to spend a good chunk of… well October playing. I say a good chunk of my weekend but really much of the time spent playing would have been otherwise completely unproductive. I.E. I would have been asleep.

This brings up rule one of Civilization, don’t talk about… no wait wrong club… don’t even think about starting later than midday. Not if you want to get to bed at a reasonable time. Now I’d like to point out, for those in the know, that we were playing the Gibson Games Edition with no expansions. I’ve heard other versions play a little faster, but I’m not sure. I’d love to play a few more games to find out.

I love playing Board Games but for some reason they seem to be treated as second class citizens in the gaming fraternity. You know how it is, people will think of themselves as Roleplayers who sneer are Larpers who both sneer at Wargamers who all sneer at CCG’ers who don’t notice because they are trying to build a deck to beat Jund (ooo look my one bit of topical Magic knowledge). And then there are Board Games, the things you do when you’re not doing your main thing.

Actually that’s not fair, I can generally find a bunch of people for a game of Talisman on a Saturday. Though my position as hand dandy rule book can get a bit annoying (on Saturday while playing Civ there was a game of Talisman going on, and rather than employ the skills of literacy the players solved rules questions by shouting them at me… you know who you are). I think it’s getting together for a big game (like Civilization, Twilight Imperium or the World of Warcraft game) that’s hard to do. The thought of sitting around for 4-6 hours playing one board game seems to confuse people.

Personally I love it, I love the table banter and the focus a good long game can have. Thinking about it I think I know why for many people the idea of playing a game for 4 hours (or more) is hellish. Monopoly and Risk, both of these are games that people may well have played when they are young. They are also games with a pretty open ended structure, they can carry on for a very very long time. Add to this the fact that often one person (sometimes two people) will get in a dominant position and everyone else is basically screwed. I think this is mainly because both games are all about losing, in so far as the only way to win is to make everyone else lose. And once you’re losing it’s very hard to make a come back but the sensible player who is winning will consolidate and take there time to ensure they don’t lose to a bad random event. This means you end up playing a long game that’s extremely tedious for everyone but one person who had a great time.

Civ on the other hand is more balanced, even if a player gets a dominant position it won’t last that long and victory doesn’t depend on wiping out your opponents anyway. In fact the players who did best in our game on Saturday didn’t really get involved in conflicts, our Egyptian player spent most of the game just expanding his lands (and avoiding the occasional flood). Similarly I played a game of Risk I enjoyed last week, but that was the God War version and it has a limited number of turns to play in. One of my most recent favourite game is Chaos in the Old World and that has a ‘You all lose’ time limit that really focusses the attention.

I think my point here, to all those people who came up to us on Saturday night saying ‘Are you still playing the same game?’ in tones of incredulity. Yes we were, it was fun, you should give it a try.

Oh that and I may be a little bit tired now.

Note on the title: I meant to mention this, the last time I managed to get a game of Civ was sometime in the mid 90′s. Hence why it’s a blast from the past.