OGRE For the Epic Win
My copy of OGRE: Designer's Edition arrived yesterday from Steve Jackson Games. Work on comics ceased while I unpacked...
I blogged about OGRE when the Kickstarter was live over a year ago, and have been enthusiastically awaiting the game's arrival for months now.
The important part of this story is not that my game arrived, or that it's huge and lived up to my unreasonable expectations. It's that my 10-year-old son's expectations were ALSO lived up to.
When I was 10, OGRE was the game I saw advertised once in the back of a comic book, and which my parents would not let me buy because buying stuff from the back of a comic book is how you get ripped off. Or at least that was their take. Now I'm 45, my youngest son is 10, and OGRE is in the house. Patch got home from school and came downstairs to the punch-and-assemble phase. He built some Ogres, some turrets and towers, some command posts, and then all the assembly was done, so we flipped open the orange maps (not shown) and played the starter game.
I cheated.
Instead of giving Patch an Ogre Mark III, per the scenario, I gave him a Mark IV. Then I took my 20 points of infantry, my 12 armor units, and did my very, very best to trap and kill that Ogre. I pounded on it with heavy artillery from a distance, I did a little hit-and-run with light ground-effect vehicles, and I fed infantry to its mighty treads in an effort to slow it down.
Patch spent two turns being cautious before he realized that movement was also a weapon. His Mark IV had lost all its main and secondary batteries by the time it rolled over my command post, but there's a certain satisfaction to be found in finishing off your opponent under your treads when treads are all you have left.
He wants to play again, this time with the GEV maps and rules. I'll probably still balance the game a bit in his favor, but next time around I will ALSO have an Ogre.
First, however, I need to make some comics.