Today I had a wargame with a guy I met through Facebook, returning to a Games Workshop game, Adeptus Titanicus, that I played once or twice thirty years ago. Unlike Games Workshop’s core games, where you spend a fortune and have to paint hundreds of toy soldiers, you spend a fortune and paint two or three giant robots (scaled down to 1/300th of their imaginary "actual" size), which in turn means you can have epic engagements rather than little skirmishes.
I brought two titans (giant robots, even though technically speaking they’re giant war engines, piloted by people, but come on, that’s as close to giant robots as we can get), assembled but unpainted, reinforced with a third person’s regiment of space marines, against an army of space dwarfs, which ganged up and blew up all of my titans (after I’d destroyed the centrepiece of his army with a single blast from my best giant robot). Call that a draw? Probably not. We played on a battlefield that was a sheet of green baize, with very few hills, and it turns out that a firefight in an open plain ends badly pretty fast. Next task: obtain more tiny buildings for tiny people and tiny giant robots to hide behind.
That was a fun way to distract myself on a rainy afternoon. Afterwards, I went home and watched Spirited Away with the girls, and then put them to bed and played three games of Blood Bowl online (a terrible loss, a win and a draw, which made me happy enough).