What does Dad play now?

This is a "family gaming" blog and I know the focus tends to fall on the kids, but today I thought I'd redirect to hubby for today's post. Now that World of Warcraft is no longer a major part of his life (although he has a cool commissioned illustration of his main character, Jherith, to commemorate the five years he spent in-game), he has time to play other things.

In terms of video games, he spent three hours today playing the latest episode of The Walking Dead. He says the game is very engaging and that there have been moments where he literally quaked based on what occured on-screen.  His other big video game time-sucker right now is Tetris on the iPad. He's got some crazy high score that I'll never beat (today I earned about 60 000 points and he has over ten times that amount) but he says when he needs to take a break from writing or cleaning, he likes just picking up the iPad and playing a round. He scoffed at the one-touch option until he realized he could gain a much higher score and abandoned the traditional method of play, which granted is a lot harder on the iPad - it's easy to accidentally turn a piece when you just mean to move it over. He used to play the Star Wars MMO with his buddy but they stopped. James says he is looking forward to Borderlands 2 coming out and playing that with his pal.

Google Plus is a much-beloved venue for him to play his RPGs. He plays in a Traveller game on Thursday nights and runs his Dwimmermount campaign alternate weeks with an Empire of the Petal Throne adventure via webcam on Fridays or Saturdays, depending on player availability.

We still play board games. Recently, our family friend brought over Fortress America. The family friend played the U.S., since he claims that the Maliszewskis always gang up on him in any competitive game. We ran out of time to finish the game but it looks promising and is actually more balanced than it first appears.

It's a bit like Risk except you have to declare your strikes in advance and the damage is much more structured (based on your air, land, and foot military units). I was the red menace, hubby was the yellow plague, and our daughter was the blue invaders. I think I had the most challenging task of the outside threats because I had a lot of cities to try and attack and I didn't have direct contact with many of them. Hubby did very well and took over L.A., Seattle and many other main cities on the west coast. I had bad dice mojo so I lost many troops. Our family friend also gets a laser every round which is pretty deadly but thankfully can only attack one target per laser per round. The benefits of the lasers are countered by the inability to place troops where he wants in America - cards he selects tells him how many units he gets and where he must place them. We'll see how it goes when we play a complete game; when we prematurely ended this session, the "bad guys" had taken ten out of the required 18 cities.

This brief overview shows that hubby, despite leaving WoW, still has a very active gaming life.