Drilling down to childhood memories

This week's game night featured not a miniatures game, not even a sci-fi or fantasy board game, but an old-school Milton Bradley game from the 1970s called King Oil. The object is to drill oil wells and make money. It's kind of like Monopoly in that you buy and build up properties with a lot of play money exchanging hands, but the uncertainty of whether your drilling attempt will be successful adds some tension to the game. I remember playing this with my cousins at our grandparents house back in the day. Growing up in West Texas among family in the awl bidniss (as Texans pronounce it), I appreciated the theme of this game.

The board is randomized at the start , so you don't know what result you will get when you pick a drilling site. There are three levels of successful well (such as the gusher pictured in the top photo) which cost certain amounts of money, or you could end up with a dry hole, which also costs money and forces you to cap the site. You draw cards to get royalties for each producing well, and maybe a chance to by more properties on which to drill. Once you have enough rigs on a piece of property, you can run pipelines to your opponents' fields, making them pay you a certain amount for each well on their property. It was a nice little nostalgia trip, but I'm wondering how widespread this game was outside the Lone Star State. Anyone else remember King Oil?

Recent & not-recent Ogre acquisitions

I recently received my copy of Ogre Battlefields, the long-awaited expansion to Ogre Designer's Edition that I purchased back in 2013. In addition to the new maps in ODE scale, there were plenty of counters added as stretch goals in the crowdfunding campaign--including some three-dimensional Ogre models in new color schemes.

And I didn't blog about it at the time, but several months ago I got my copy of Ogre Miniatures Second Edition. I have a couple of copies of the first edition from eBay, so this was more of a way to support the publisher than any real need.

In addition to the templates for running minis games, this product also came with some 3-D models--including rare units like the Vulcan and Ninja.

While all the counters are nifty, I'm more of a miniatures player these days, so I'm thinking about selling off the sheets--at least the faction reskins--which should go to someone who will get more use out of them. But whether you prefer miniatures or cardboard, it's a good time to be an Ogre player.