Gaming 2019/09/26 Summit

The HackMaster moniker has been removed from the Subject line. I'm retiring that campaign and going strictly to ad hoc games for the time being.

Games are normally on Thursday nights sometime after 6:00PM at World's Best Comics, 9714 Warwick Blvd Newport News, Virginia 23601. (Yes I moved back to Thursday.)

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Last game on September 26, we Played two games of Milton Bradley's "Summit" from 1961. This was a blast from the past from the Cold War that has relevance to Today. Three to six Players play over a polar projection of a world map and represent major world powers, U.S., Russia, China, Western Europe, India and South American as a whole. (Given the relevance to the 1960s I think the last two countries were thrown in because they needed to make space for 6 Players.)

The game design offered a "training game" where the random events deck are pre-programmed so the Players learn what to do by doing for the first two turns. This was our first game so we opted to continue as it was after the pre-programmed turns. The second game we played naturally. I won't say what the results were or who won, (mainly because I forgot).

It is actually more fun to describe the game. The players are supposed to build their economies by spending resources (represented by "I" beams) to build tokens representing steel mills, factories, and military bases on minor countries at a cost of two "I" beams each. Countries can share the same steel mills and factories, but if you but a military base on a minor country, the mills and factories are removed and the owner gets a token representing scrap to rebuild elsewhere.

Steel mills in your own country produce an "I" beam, and with a hat tip to the colonial exploitation of the time a steel mill in a minor country produces two "I" beams.

The event cards also seem like today's news, for example a trade dispute can make you lose production or that your country develops a new missile so you get a military power token. One player commented, "These cards can be updated by prefixing it with "Your President's tweet causes ...".

Victory is determined by adding up tokens across the board by event card that calls for a census which may occur several times throughout the game. You get extra points by having a military base on each country on the final census.


Next game is Tomorrow, I plan on bringing out an old TSR classic "Dungeon!" which was a board-like reenactment of a Dungeons & Dragons game back in the day.

Tracy Johnson