No way around it; I just am. And, I have a pretty dodgy attention span too. Stacking those two traits, it's no wonder that it's so hard for me to get around to game-related "chores" like punching games and clipping counters.
But, I am not hopeless! On occasion, I'll unleash a veritable flurry of game-prepping activity on my unsuspecting collection. For whatever reason, this past week was such an occasion. I completely punched not one, not two, but three games.
First up was Twilight Struggle. I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I had just bought the new deluxe edition, and it was delivered last week. It's a very impressive looking game, and I turned this one around from "in shrink" to "ready to play" in record time. The cards are sleeved (and not penny sleeves either -- I broke out the Dragon Shields for this one) and the counters are punched and sorted. The counters are the nice thick ones with rounded corners (no clipping!). I love those. I really hope to get some games of this in soon. We'll see.
Next was Nexus Ops. I picked this one up about a year ago. Up until a couple of days ago, it was out of shrink, but otherwise completely unpunched. I finally got around to prepping this one because we were going to play it at the Monkey Den this week, until Snowmageddon intervened. More nice, thick, rounded counters. I edged those, and the hex tiles, with a black Sharpie and they look very -- sharp. I still need to figure out something to do with the monolith hex, though. I don't want to use the stock fold-up tower thing for a variety of reasons. I bought a small sheet of black foamcore, and I'll probably start hacking at that this weekend in an attempt to rig up a replacement. Anyway, I am salivating to play this.
Finally, I tackled Fields of Fire. Holy cow. This probably deserved its own post, but here we are. Let me start by saying that the first sign that FoF is not for the faint of heart is the five counter sheets that greet one upon the unboxing. (Well, OK, the first sign is probably the 3,000 BGG threads with titles like "ZOMG THIS IS NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART!!!" But the counter sheets are definitely the second.) Seriously, this is not a hex-and-counter game, but it has 880 counters.
I was taken aback.
As I said before, I think learning to play this is going to be a massive undertaking. I'm not quite ready to tear into that task right at the moment, but I do see the day coming in the near term when I will be. In preparation, I decided to get the game physically ready to go. The cards (the action and Normandy decks at least) also got Dragon Shielded (I am totally out of them now), and then I dove into the counter sheets. I worked on them here and there for a week, and they are finally done. Punched, sorted (roughly), bagged, and clipped.
I should add that I find them (and the cards too, for that matter) very nicely done. They are attractive and understated. They are colorful, but still entirely practical and functional -- never busy. I especially like some of the graphics choices -- the use of unit badges instead of little drawings of soldiers, for example. Plus, I have an absolutely irrational love for the use of any variety of Courier font on WWII game components. (I said it, and I'm not ashamed of it.)
In fact, the entire aesthetic presence of Fields of Fire is pretty close to perfect in my eyes. To summarize the look of the game in one word: classy. I've said before that the eye candy aspect of gaming is genuinely important to me, so I mean all of that as very high praise.
