[The posts for this month are reposts from the site www.honotogroabemo.org, on which a host of hirsute individuals including yours truly would grow beards to raise money for breast cancer research. The site is defunct, but I thought I’d resurrect the game-related posts. This was originally posted on 2011-11-27.]

(Less angel and devil than foe and foe)

So I took a day off a week or so ago, and promised that I’d add an extra game to make up. As this is the last weekend in the month, this is probably the last day I can do this. So here you are, two games and two pictures for today. This also makes up for missing Day 0 (Jeff, please take note).

For this picture, I should really be wearing white and carrying a jackhammer, but hopefully my friends — or should I say enemies? — should help give you a clue. The guy on my shoulder should really be wearing yellow goggles as well, but I didn’t have any in his size.

Day Twenty-Six‘s game is BattleLore, one of the games in Richard Borg’s Commands and Colors series. The series covers time periods from the Classical (Commands and Colors: Ancients) to the Civil War (Battle Cry) to World War II (Memoir: 44). The general idea of the series is that the battlefield is broken into three parts, and you play cards to control the left wing, right wing, or center. If you don’t have a card in your hand to control that area of the battlefield, too bad. In an abstract way, this represents occasional breakdowns of the chain of command.

BattleLore is an odd duck, being both a game of medieval warfare and a fantasy warfare game. So the Scots are represented by Dwarves, and the Saracens (sort of) by Goblins. Creatures, presumably, represent war machines. Or do they? It’s not very clear. There’s also magic (or Lore) — or you can play without it. For this reason, it’s been hard to sell it, both for Days of Wonder, the original publisher, and Fantasy Flight, who bought the license in 2008.

The game also has a large number of figures, making it expensive to produce. So when FFG put all the expansions up for sale, it really does send a message that they’re done with this game. Thus making it vintage before its time. [Of course, since then FFG put out the Second Edition… and since there haven’t been any updates since 2015 it’s probably also on its way out. – Ed.]