To me Armorica will always be the locale where Asterix and Obelix lived in a small gaulish village. Many puns were lovingly made throughout all the books ("Gods bless Armorica")

Of course when the Normans turned up they pushed a lot of the indiginous inhabitants West - thus we have Armorica dividing into modern day Normandy and Brittany ('Normans' & 'Brittons')

Kudos to the surprisingly thorough Avalon Hill retrospective. While games like Dune and Circus Maximus still awaiting their triumphant return, hopefully in the hands of someone who recognizes that while their rulebooks’ style is admittedly archaic, the rules themselves hold up quite well indeed, the new owners have perhaps given the AH imprint as fair a shake as they’ve known how. Indeed with worthy titles like Vegas Showdown and Betrayal At House on the Hill, it seemed to be the only place that Hasbro briefly dared to experiment with new titles rather than throwing an established brand onto a box full of variants. But they stumbled on a few of those titles, and the online gamerati is a tough and unforgiving crowd- indeed one unidentified game designer I met at PAX referred to the more obsessive denizens of a certain website as “people who would complain about anything”. Someone for instance has listed Rocketville on BGG as the worst game in their collection despite admitting in the same post that they had never actually played it; the echo chamber’s resonating word was enough for them. Those who didn’t know the AH name didn’t support the new titles and those who did attacked them and well, they just seemed to kind of give up. Hopefully the return of Betrayal this October will do well enough to persuade the company that having a more experimental wing can pay off and we’ll see another batch of new titles. Hopefully those new titles will in turn be impressive enough to make people reconsider calling them “Hasbro Hill.” Hopefully I will shortly be showered with thousands of dollars in small bills while an enticing temptress tells me how very interesting I am.

Oh and okay, perfesser, I feel really stupid now. I always assumed that Joyce had coined the word Armorica as in “Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea had passencore rearrived from North Armorica” etc… Sheesh! How could I ever have forgotten such a legendary group of fighters as the Armorican pikemen, also known as (wait for it…) the Brittany Spears! (Yes. Yes. It took a lot of Gaul to make that joke...)

 Something I was thinking about during the Sommelier segment this time: While there are definitely plenty of games where experience level can make break an experience, I see two categories here.

There are games (Chess comes to mind, trickier open information games and even more traditional war games) where it can be a huge learning boon to get trounced a few times by your superior. We tried Breakout Normandy one time, and struggled just figuring out what we needed to be doing: that one goes back on the shelf until one of us can get stomped on by a grog and bring that experience back to the table. 

Other games as Dave mentioned (card driven games in particular I think fit this), reward knowledge of the deck. These are great games for learning along with your regular gaming group. It can be very rewarding to discover the card deck with another new player, but that is a difficult process against someone who already knows which cards are added in a certain phase and can prepare for that. 

It may not be as much fun losing big several times in a game, but in many cases it can be a rewarding learning experience.