It was 8:00pm-ish, and I needed something to do. Al Griego was just sitting down with a small group to play " Frag," a Steve Jackson game involving miniatures. The premise is simple. You are a group of gamers playing a first-person shooter. The first one to score three "frags" (kills) wins. If you get fragged, then on your next turn you'll re-spawn and be back in the action. Al is not being paid enough. He was a GREAT host. He explained things clearly, played both well AND graciously, and supplied prizes for the winners as well as for those who got fragged the most, and fragged the worstest. I had a great time. Granted, this was in part because I won, but it's also because the game is just too much fun. We shouted. We taunted. We punned. We got and gave frags. And apparently I was among the loudest of those laughing... Chris Quinn's blog of the event mentions me as follows: I am going to head over and check out the game Howard Tayler is playing in. It seems like the folks at his table are laughing every 10 seconds. And Howard, he is the guy who did that outstanding sketch of me, looks as if he is holding court to a captive audience. Dude is a character. He had me laughing most of the day as I sat here blogging. His booth was right next to the area they gave me to write from.
Okay, for the record, this "captive audience" was anything but "captive." They shot back, giving at least as good as they got. Chris must have caught that one moment in the second game, when Al prepared to roast me with the flamethrower and I played the "insubstantial" hack. My taunting went on for at least thirty seconds as the flames went through me to no effect, and included head-slapping a-la Monty Python and the Holy Grail and a saracastic cry of "Mommy, Mommy, I'm so hot!" I won round two as well, and did so with violent aplomb. A few of us (including me) had one frag, and one guy had two. But on my last turn I'd played the "Extreme Damage" gadget, doubling the damage of my machine gun. It was going to last through the end of the current turn, but I needed to be SURE of my kills. So I played the "Bonus Damage" hack for an additional doubling. Boom! I fragged Al with 9 points of damage (you roll your damage dice, your target rolls his health dice, and the number of times his roll can be divided into your roll is the amount of damage he takes -- I think I rolled around 48 on 12 six-siders, while Al rolled 5 on his two dice of health). Not bad. Then I took my movement roll, and got within a couple of spaces of a pair of players who had been duking it out during their last turn. I had one attack coming to me, but the machine gun allows you to split one attack across two targets. The first guy took 9 points of damage. The second took 19. I only rolled 39 with my twelve dice, but he rolled a two. I ended up fragging three people in one turn, and two of them in one attack, ending our second game with FOUR frags instead of the requisite three. Yes, Al gave me prizes. I came away with the PvP expansion for Frag (I've got to get Kurtz to sign this!) and the "Cardboard Heroes" package of cutouts for those who need lots and lots of minatures on a budget. The guy I fragged for 19 points of damage won the "worst frag" of that game, and thanked me profusely for helping him win a Frag expansion. I'm going to have to go out and buy this game. If you're interested in it, you can buy it direct from Steve Jackson Games, or through any game store near you.
