The Regulars

I'm Josh. I write comic book articles here on the Fort every month, but I still like to throw in a game review every once in awhile.

I grew up playing family board games and various other superhero licensed games as a kid. I got into Magic, D&D, and Warhammer in my middle school/high school days. It wasn't until my girlfriend (now wife) got me the LOTR edition of Risk for my 19th birthday that I got really into board gaming. That was during the "Golden Age of FFG." They'd just put out TI3, Arkham Horror, War of the Ring, etc. Those games really appealed to me, but I dabbled in pretty much every other type of game out there. Board gaming took center stage as my primary hobby once I got Battlestar Galactica. That game really had me look at which games I enjoy most and why I enjoy playing games at all. I'm pretty sure that's why I'm here at F:AT now.

A few other things:

- Ghosbusters is my favorite movie
- Will stand by the opinion that "Year One" is a smidgen better than "Dark Knight Returns"
- Owner of two rabbits, Gimli and Willow
- Tremendous fan of Conan the Barbarian
- Witness of Matt Loter's "Great Scolding of 2011"

I'm Mads. 31, live in Copenhagen, Demark and do stand-up comedy for a living. This also include the occasional stint in radio, some writing for tv, and stuff like that. Hey, I even design board games once in a while - most recently I helped making a co-op game about traffic management for school kids in Copenhgagen. I have a wife, a cat, a girl aged two, and a second kid on the way.

I played a lot of games with my folks as a kid. DungeonQuest, HeroQuest, Monopoly, Fighting Fantasy (not really a board game though), Scotland Yard and stuff like that. Even bought my younger brother the Platoon board game when he turned ten or eleven and I was 12 or so because he was very into the Vietnam War and I was very into board games. Also spend a lot of time making up games, but unfortunately none of them have survived. Played Risk, Man O War and Warhammer 40K later on, role played a lot (Warhammer and Call at first, later on more indie stuff), and then returned to board games when in my twenties and was introduced to Twilight Imperium 2nd by some RPG friends and haven't looked back since.

And just to shamelessly plug myself here's a short clip of me performing in English short clip here . I've been dabbling in it for about a year and a half, so in about 10 or 15 years I'm probably confident enough to try and do a real show in English at a festival or some such.

I'm still a dickhead who will likely be offended by something you said on the internet. Get a few bottles of cheap pink wine in me though, and I think I'm a pretty good time.

In my personal life, I did/do a whole lot of awesome stuff the likes of which you can only dream of.

I play a lot of games.

I'm unfortunate enough to have played games/hung out with most of the regulars here, and intend to knock off a big chunk of those missing from the list at Averyfest when people line up to punch me in the mouth.

I write stuff about games/movies/other nerdy stuff once in a while and wish I had the disposition to do more of it but alas, I seem not to.

I'm also a tremendous fan of Conan the Barkbarian.

MattLoter wrote:
I'm also a tremendous fan of Conan the Barkbarian.

Even when he eats a $100 bill?

Conan ate a c note? That's rough brother. Anyway, I'm Jay. I currently own and operate a rock n roll dive bar in Brooklyn called the Second Chance Saloon, but I've also been a bike messenger, an EMT, and an iron worker with local 361. I had a pet pig for 5 years, but now it's just the missus and I, our son, and our pooch.

I grew up playing games with my family and when I was a bit older got into stuff like D&D and Blood Bowl. When I was in my early teens I took a 15 or so year sabbatical from gaming aside from the odd game of Scrabble and the like. I got back into it when I found a copy of the Thieves World Sanctuary board game at a Salvation Army which got me digging around on the internet. I found Battlestations which brought me to BGG and I've been pretty obsessive about it ever since, although I don't get to game anywhere near as much as I'd like.

My gaming tastes are fairly similar to my taste in music; I like almost any music as long as it sounds good, but I always find my way back to the heavy stuff. Similarly, I can have a good time playing almost any game with friends, but I prefer heavy and/or more thematic fare. Some of my favorites are Fury of Dracula, Twilight Struggle, Arkham Horror, Tikal, Game of Thrones LCG, and War of the Ring to name just a few.

I also dig comics, cycling, binge drinking, long walks on the beach, karaoke, shooting pool, movies, cuddling, oysters, The Washington Redskins, and I read quite a bit. If any of y'all are in New York stop by the bar. I'll buy you a few drinks and maybe we can get a game going.


Here's the most recent pic I could find. I'm the guy with the beer at the bottom

Alright, I'll try my hand at this, even though I may be on of the most hated regular(Well maybe mjl is, since Octavian got all huggy with some of the crew).

I am Mike Chapel, 40 years old, live in Austin Texas, and I work for IBM. Besides the occasional game of Life and Chutes and Ladders, my gaming career essentially began in my 11th year. My new stepbrother introduced me to this new game called Dungeons and Dragons. I still remember going through “Keep on the Borderlands” so vividly. My mom bought me the set for xmas, and from that point for many years, my childhood was filled with many hours of D&D, Gamma world, and all points in between.

I got a taste of boardgaming while I was an early teen with my neighbor. He gave me a stack of these small “baggy” games called Ogre, GEV, Red Alert, etc... They were different and a great diversion from the same old RPG.

After graduation in ‘88 I joined up to the U.S. Navy. I figured my gaming days were left far behind. But I was wrong! Spending weeks at a time out to sea could easily get fairly boring, but I had games. Marvel super heroes, D&D, and if the ship wasn’t a-rockin’, Axis and Allies/Titan/Conquest of Empires in almost every ocean on the planet.

After my time was up in the military, I headed to college. I got a part time job working for my FLGS growing up, “Wargames West”. I’m sure some people remember them, as they had one of the country’s biggest mail order catalogs. I still remember waiting for that catalog in the mail. The pinnacle of my days there was in 1993 when Wayne Godfrey got back from GenCon with this new Card game called “Magic the Gathering” that he had exclusive distribution rights for. That was the beginning of a several year addiction. I still have two large boxes collecting dust up in the closet. After “Fallen Empires”, I had a serious case of anti-Magic sentiment. I went through several iterations of the CCGs with games like Doomtrooper, Bloodwars, Star Wars, etc. But soon enough, I just couldn’t play them anymore. The collectable side just burnt me out.
So I thought I would try my hand at painting Warhammer 40k mini’s in the mid-90’s. From one addiction to the next. It only lasted a couple of years, as the constant arguing over rules, and too many different rules kind of soured the whole experience for me. That and the fact that I really didn’t have the artistic abilities to paint anything that didn’t look like a blob of coloring mess.

After graduation I headed to Austin, Texas in 1998. This is where I met up with a group that liked playing Advanced Squad Leader. The next addiction and I spent the next couple years fighting every single WWII battle, one hedge row at a time.

Then with my weekly poker group when we weren’t in the mood for Texas Hold’em, I pulled out my copy of Settlers of Catan, History of the World, Titan, and Civilization that I played on occasion in the past. They absorbed them like a sponge. While surfing newsgroups like Spielfrieks and rec.games.board, I found that there was a lunchtime games group at IBM where I worked run by Ed Rozmiarek . There I learned of a weekly Thursday game night at Ed and Susan’s house. That is where my euro-craze took off. From there I found out about Russcon, another local game night.

Since then I've gotten married, and had a baby. I usually play wednesday nights with a regular group, and the occasional RPG nights of D&D, Gamma World, Rogue Trader, etc. I play almost anything nowadays, and since the cult of the new is starting to wear off, and I am no longer buying every game in sight I'm actually starting to fill the gaps in my collection with a lot more older titles that I may have lost in the shuffle, sold or traded away.

I'm a total movie freak, my NetFlix database is around ~5000 movies watched and rising. I'm also primarily a Science Fiction book reader, as my "book" shelf probably takes up more space then my "game" shelf. which both I do a lot more recently now that I have a baby.

jay718 wrote: Here's the most recent pic I could find. I'm the guy with the beer at the bottom

Looks like the New York chapter of The Ameritrash Man fan club.

Death and Taxis wrote:

jay718 wrote: Here's the most recent pic I could find. I'm the guy with the beer at the bottom

Looks like the New York chapter of The Ameritrash Man fan club.

Thanks?

I'm Bistro. Been around forever. Used to be verbose, now not so much. And I find it amusing that I barely qualify to post in this thread. I pledge to try to write something of great intellectual interest once every five years or so. You should really look forward to my next blog post three years from now, all about using masturbation to psych-out opponents.

I turned to war games as a child when my parents forbade me to play video games. They forbade me to do a lot of stuff actually, so no doubt they're pleased as punch I do all of it now. Well not all of it. Dad's tip about avoiding squirrel fondling seems sound. I started off with war games like that monster 70s War of the Ring game. That thing was ponderously wonderful. The Great Khan Game then pretty much set the bar for everything I love in games: asymmetry, tough choices, and fucking friends over. D&D followed and that was pretty much it. I'm a game nerd, but pretend I'm not because I say 'fuck' a lot.

I live in Virginia with my wife and mentally ill cat. He really is mentally ill too - we have to put him in a bondage collar to keep him from mutilating himself.

I am John, a mid 40s prototypical gamer (except I shower and am Canadian) and after 3 years I made it to 100 posts so I am a big boy now!

I started gaming in the 70s with Risk and when I moved back to Manitoba I took up with a nerd crowd and introduced them to D&D in 79. We played some bastardized version of AD&D and D&D for a couple of years as I slowly bought more AD&D books. We also played SFB & Diplomacy.

I went to university in the mid 80s and promptly spent too much time playing games and drinking booze, needless to say I was asked to "graduate" a year after I started.
In the late 80s I managed/owned a game store in Saskatoon called The Wizard's Corner, which I almost saved from death (we closed in 1992). We played assorted games (primarily Adv Civ and History of the World) until 1996 when Settler's came out, it struck me as such a crap game I left boardgaming until I was introduced to more games at FallCon in Calgary (I moved there in 2000). In the mid 90's I also went to school and got a Engineering Technologist Diploma.

Since 2003 I have purchased too many freaking games and played not often enough. I moved back to Saskatoon in 2010 and now am organising a new gaming group and a new gaming con.

I also enjoy reading, home brewing and my favourite colour is some colour or another.

Thought I put something up here ages ago, but obviously not after a quick check.

I'm another Aussie, PhD in mathematics, and my job title at a medium size firm is Mathematician, which I think is pretty cool, as no-one believes that it is possible.

I was a minis gamer primarily who dabbled in boardgames, but lately the shift has been to pure boardgames. This old blog post sums my gaming up nicely, so I will let it do the talking:
fortressat.com/index.php?option=com_cont...w&id=1356&Itemid=551

jay718 wrote:

Death and Taxis wrote:

jay718 wrote: Here's the most recent pic I could find. I'm the guy with the beer at the bottom

Looks like the New York chapter of The Ameritrash Man fan club.

Thanks?

I'm a big fan of The Ameritrash Man so that was a compliment.

I'm Andy, I'm about to be an ex-PhD student who's decided he can't stand math any longer and wants to leverage the other part of his education to go into software (anyone know of any internships/entry-level jobs available? Anyone? Anyone?). I think I'm mainly known around here as the Magic guy: I've been playing since 1994, and despite loving any and all various odd kids board games prior to that, Magic was definitely my gateway to gaming, and is still my vote for best game of all time. I was a junior-high-schooler at the time and dabbled in tons of CCGs, I mean tons, and I've since gone back and revisited the more well-respected ones. In 1995-1996 I started playing Cosmic Encounter, Diplomacy, and then Settlers of Catan, and Cosmic Encounter is still my favorite multiplayer game of all time.

In high school I barely played anything but Settlers. After high school I went to Germany for a year and brought back all the greats: El Grande, Tigris and Euphrates, Modern Art, Wildlife Adventure, Tikal. In college we ravenously played the aforementioned German games, as well as Puerto Rico, Diplomacy, and Cosmic Encounter. I also went to college with one of the top five Magic judges in the world, and he held free drafts all the time; this got me back into playing Magic.

In grad school, I started out playing mainly the old German games I knew, and then a sale at Target sold me Heroscape. Interest in finding more games led me to BGG, which I loved but knew was horrifically flawed due to the absurdly low placement of Diplomacy, Magic, and Cosmic Encounter. My wife's encouragement of my more nerdy tendencies led me to realize that it was the nerdy fantasy & sci-fi games that I loved the most, and somehow I found the old F:AT blog in the first month or two of its existence, and have been following it ever since.

Sorry, to summarize:
- Magic is my favorite game
- Cosmic Encounter is my favorite board game
- I love all kinds of games, not just ameritrash (90s German games definitely have a soft spot in my heart)
- I also hate some games that people here love, like Chaos in the Old World and Yomi
- I'm lucky enough to have a wife who loves playing games with me
- My other great love is comics, and mostly "alternative" comics, despite loving superheroes when done well, because it's almost impossible to find well-done superhero comics
- I nearly got my PhD in math, but am now trying to get into the software industry
- I love film from all eras and countries, but probably my favorite genres are screwball comedies, dance-focused musicals, and horror
- I'll listen to any genre of music, but my favorite eras are the classical era of classical music (i.e. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven), late 70s punk, and of course late 60s rock/pop
- I'm a bit of a perfectionist, completist, and snob
- My currently-8-month-old son has put a pretty big kibosh on my playing games lately, but that's no big deal
- I live in San Diego right now, hoping to move up to the Bay Area to be closer to all my closest friends and family

Though I don't feel like I'm one of 'the regulars' I would guess my post count would qualify me.

Grew up an army brat playing D&D and MB Gamemaster games on US bases across Germany in the early and mid 80's. Found my first GW game (DungeonQuest) at a little hole in the wall German gamestore called 'Gerds' (iirc) in Kaiserslautern around '86 or '87 (funny, we were actually on a trip to K-town so my folks could show my visiting grandparents the red light district). My brother and I never looked back and GW became our gaming company of choice. We were all in. their boardgames, card games, books, White Dwarfs, everything.

Had a difficult time in the mid 90's when I was living two lives in Huntsville, Al. One with a group of gamers and the other with a small group of skins and punks. During this time, I also got my degree in education.

Moved to Austin in '99 to teach 5th grade. Meet a group of local rpgers who advertised their homebrew game to be played at the UT's Student Union. Had nothing to lose, so I checked it out. Ended up getting along with another GM (talking wrestling), an emo kid who was actually there crashing the homebrew and I joined his group off campus. Played and partied with that lot for awhile, until some of the parties were getting a bit too hot for someone trying to be an upstanding citizen, so I pulled a few fellas away from that and introduced them to Blood Bowl. Ran BB leagues for three years straight from about 2001 to 2004. I also won BB tourneys in Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin during this time. OD'd on the game and sold it all off, but a form of the league continues (though I no longer know any of the players save one and I recently met him by chance).

My wife was also a teacher, so when pregnant with our first child she decided to stay at home which meant I needed a new job. Sold off a closet full of classic GW boardgames and minis for a mint to help pay for a house. I now live in Kyle (just south of Austin) and work at the University of Texas as a Senior Software Developer/Analyst.

Oh yeah, I'm 36 and have two kids. A boy (4yr) and girl (7mo). I'm also in the continued process of culling down my collection to just the essentials. I would consider the game changing games for me have been in order: D&D, Samurai Swords/Shogun, DungeonQuest, Blood Bowl, Settlers of Catan, and Hammer of the Scots. Besides a little Shadowrun, I never got into the CCG games. Also, I prefer to play a few games over and over rather than sample a wide range. I agree with others that it's more fun to trash talk and focus on strategy rather than on getting the rules correct.

I also like to stay active. I'm a frequent runner and work out a bit. Besides competing in races, over the past 10 years I've played soccer, football, basketball, boxed, and attended a pro-wrestling school where I tried to get a gimmick over as a gringo luchadore. Also a fan of camping, canoeing, and fishing.

Here's a recent picture of me driving an old Massey Ferguson for hay rides out in Marble Falls. Though I'm a rock'n'roll kid through and through, I usually dress a little bit country. Nothing is as comfortable to me as some torn jeans, a pair of broken in cowboy boots, and a dusty ballcap.



(edit: damn that came out pretty big)

I'm the one in the black shirt: