Geeking out with Erik yesterday was pretty fun, and I look forward to doing it again in the future. The game we played, called Federation Commander, was a bit more high-tech than I was anticipating. Using laminated cards and dry-erase markers rather than pencils and paper, the game was playable “out of the box” and required no tedious setup at all. (Well, not tedious for me, anyway; Erik was tasked with explaining the somewhat-complicated mechanics of the game to me. Over and over again, because I couldn’t follow them at first.) To a newbie like me, this type of game is frighteningly complicated, but the complicatedness dissolves once you see how it all works. By the time my Klingon ship had Erik’s Federation ship in tatters, I was beginning to feel at home within the universe, and think that I’ll have even more fun next time we do it.

One of the things that really amused me is that Federation Commander, a game emblazoned with familiar Star Trek language and iconography, is not actually licensed by the Trek people and doesn’t actually say Star Trek on any of the materials anywhere. All the game materials, however, do proudly proclaim that they’re copyrighted, daring anyone to use them without permission under threat from lawyers. That takes balls.

Here’s the cover of the game box:

I tried to take photos to “document” the game, but quickly found out two things: 1) I needed to pay attention to the game, and b) it’s very much a “you had to be there” game. Little cardboard squares on the cardboard map of the universe do not really make for entertaining photos. You can see for yourself, though.

After Erik surrendered to me (the luck of the dice), we went to lunch and had geeky conversation.  Then we geekily looked through some Ruby on Rails projects he’s working on, and then played a little bit of that game Crysis I’ve seen on digg a lot lately.  I sucked at it, but it looks pretty awesome.  Maybe they’ll make it for the Wii so I can play through it.  There was also much iPhone discussion, and we played with my OLPC a little.  Throughout the day Erik’s wife Monica brought us delicious snacks that were decidedly non-geeky.  Yummy veggies, spinach hummus, hot tea; nary a Dorito or Mountain Dew to be seen.  Thank goodness :).

I didn’t even have to use my lightsaber;  I guess it was a good day.  (<—- Ice Cube reference)

Defined tags for this entry: federation commander, gaming, geeky, role playing, socializing, star trek, tabletop gaming

In a short while I’ll be heading over to Erik‘s house, where we are going to apparently “get our geek on.”  There will be gaming that involves pencils, paper, starships, dice (?), and, apparently, interplanetary conquest.  This will be my first foray into this type of gaming, and I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to think of it, but I feel that if I’m going to continue being a geek I need to try some of this stuff.  I think it’ll be fun.  Plus, because it is all imaginary, if there are any hot Wookiee or Borg girls hanging around I’ll be free to “do them” without spousal reprisal.  My magic missile is aquiver with anticipation.

I grew up having disdain for “role playing” games drilled into me, due to the apparently millions of kids who were unable to tell fantasy from reality and ended up killing themselves and/or others when they couldn’t handle the events that happened to either them or their characters.  I suspect this was largely false information being spread by James Dobson and the rest of the armies of Christian naysayers, and that there’s no truth at all to it.  Still, I’m going to bring my lightsaber in case things get out of hand.

Defined tags for this entry: gaming, geeky, role playing, socializing