Our morning started off with us learning War of the Ring the card game.

We played the two player Fellowship of the Ring scenario. It’s slightly less complicated rules wise. Only uses paths and battlegrounds that cover the first book, and the battlegrounds are not chosen at random but played in order. The decks are also constructed differently, taking out certain cards from the factions, or missing a faction altogether.

After a slow start as we learnt the rules as we played we soon got into the swing of things.

Oh Nath played the part of the Fellowship, while I played the Nazgûl.

It was interesting that early on I had card advantage, was drawing more cards. But that flipped in the later stages to Nath having the card advantage.

It’s certainly a very nice game, with interesting choices to be made every turn. Which starts with which card to discard and which to play. As you can’t play a card without discarding one.

Then you have to decide to whether play the card to a path, battleground or into reserve.

As the forces of darkness I was cycling through my deck a lot, and I didn’t take advantage of certain card abilities to thin out my opponents cards.

I’m pretty sure we had rules errors whilst playing. But who cares? we had fun.

Somehow my Nazgûl won by a single point.

After visiting the game shop in Basingstoke (I left with War machine, Iron Heart, and Green Goblin scenario pack, and got Nath a MtG Challenger deck) we saw the new Super Mario Bros movie.

Wow I’ve not laughed like that during a movie in a long time. It’s a great movie. Although I may be biased as a Mario fan.

Obviously my age means I got to play Mario back in the day when he was just Jump Man and not the main attraction, just a supporting act.

My first real Mario game though was Super Mario Land on the GameBoy. Yeah I missed the main Mario games on the NES/SNES because I didn’t own either. I loved the original Mario Golf on the GameBoy too.

At the time as you know from my Doom posts I was on a pc mainly playing stuff there. The GameBoy was my “console” at the time. For some reason I love portable gaming systems.

I’m currently reading a book about Super Mario Bros 2. I find these sort of books about our gaming history interesting and add to my enjoyment of the game in question. And yes I will be going back and playing the game once the Doom project is finished.

Back to the movie. There is so much fan service here and it’s a delight as you spot the Easter eggs such as the NES console, or Punchout being mentioned.

I loved the humour, and was laughing a lot during the movie.

This was the perfect Mario movie! It did exactly what the games do, bring a smile to the face.

Certain scenes made me want to play a Mario game. A weaker soul going into Game afterwards would have caved and bought another Mario game. However I did play Mario Kart 8 later in the evening to get the “craving” out of my system.

Later in the evening Nath and I played a couple of games of MtG with him using his new deck. We shared the honours.