Thinking Outside the Box

Today I come to regale you with tales of something very different than my normal posts, but still technically tabletop games! This time I'm going to be talking about one of my favourite sports: HOCKEY. Part 1) My workmates and I sometimes get together during Friday lunch hours to play card or board games.With the  NHL Stanley Cup  playoffs in full swing my brain was most definitely in 'hockey mode' so I suggested we play a game of Big League Hockey Manager , with the included "Stanley Cup" expansion! This game is tough to play in an hour, but we did our best to crank through it. Knowing we were limited in time we played to three match wins rather than five. This was the first time we had used the expansion and everyone agreed that it added a lot to the game. Konrad and Sonja ended up as the two finalists, playing Pittsburgh and San Jose respectively. The Penguins pulled out to an early 3-0 series lead, but some savvy coaching of the Sharks saw them make a ...

Yesterday I had a chance to pit my newly-minted Etherian Horde  robot team up against the Snake Mountain Smashers  Orx/Goblin team in a game of Dreadball . William was coaching the Smashers, who were sitting at a whopping 145mc team value from their experience in the Trilogy league this spring. My Horde were at their starting 100mc, which gave them four rolls on the free agent table netting them two human strikers, an Orx guard and a Forge Father guard. The Smashers started the game with home advantage and the punishment followed quick and painfully. My robots went from new and shiny to dented and decapitated in short order. They couldn't transform, or when they were successful simply got hammered back to the pitch, or knocked into the sin bin. Whoa it's getting crowded in here! At one point near the 3/4 mark of the game I had two dead robots, and only two players on the pitch...neither of whom were robot players. Without my human striker (lucky #7) in there scorin...