Like the vast majority of new blogs, this one died a quiet death. I didn't mean to let it die, I started with good intentions, had a lot of ideas for interesting content, and was generally enjoying the whole process. Things change though and towards the end of last year I found myself reading less and less and so there seemed less and less reasons for me to keep a blog active that relied on me reading constantly. There are a number of reasons behind the lack of reading, I think I just burnt out a little, my youngest daughter's lack of sleep didn't help with my concentration in the evenings, but the biggest reason was another, newer interest that was slowly pushing many others aside.
So what was this new interest which had surreptitiously crept into my thoughts, and slowly grown to push aside my love of reading? Well it was gaming...
...no not video games, I've been playing those regularly as far back as I can remember. I even found the old console I started on recently, one of those old pong/racing/tennis things where every game involved a number of white squares on a black background and the controllers were two little knobs you could turn on the console itself.
No the games that have been consuming my thoughts are board games, and not just those old traditional games of Scrabble and Monopoly that everyone seems to have played growing up, but a whole plethora of games that I had very little idea existed. Sure I knew a little of strategy games and wargames, and I had dipped my toes in the gaming waters back in the Games Workshop years, but I was largely unaware of the huge number of interesting games available until I stumbled across something last year which would lead me on to this fascinating new obsession...and I call it an obsession with good reason.
That little something I stumbled across was Zombie in my Pocket. I'm not sure where I found it or how, it might have been a Boing Boing post or just the result of a random search but somehow I found it, this game about zombies I could print...and play. That in itself blew me away, that there were people creating games that I could then print out and play, but the fact that the game was actually fun was the tipping point. I had to know what else was out there and it wasn't long before I found myself poised on the edge of the rabbit hole that is BoardGameGeek. I fell in and some eight months later I'm just climbing out, blinking at the sunshine and coming to the realisation that my life will from this point on always contain board games. Actually my wife came to this realisation a lot quicker, after opening a cupboard containing my exponentially expanding collection and exclaiming "by Jove don't these boxes consume a large volume of space" but perhaps in slightly more colourful language.
So like a not particularly impressive Phoenix rising from some barely cold ashes, I'm resurrecting Dummies and Death Rays. The themes here remain fairly similar, I still love science fiction, horror and fantasy, I still love the pulps, comics, and b-movies, but I will be shifting my focus from mostly books to include board games and gaming in general. I'll still be reading and reviewing when I can but I'm expecting this new interest to play a big part in the content available here. I'm not going to make any promises I can't keep about updating this blog but I'm hoping to at least keep the old thing active.
Thanks for reading, more to follow shortly.
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