W. Eric Martin: Games for Soldiers 2009

I don’t have the best record in following through on projects that I start. (If you’ve failed to notice this tendency, despite such evidence as the months-late game giveaway to BGN members or the lag time in raising the BGN membership rate, then ignore that libel directed against my person. I’m a paragon of timeliness!) Thus I’m only now posting the results of the 2009 Games for Soldiers Drive, roughly three months after the drive ended with nearly $1,000 in the kitty. In particular, I want to thank:

• Alfredo Nevarez at Thought Hammer for once again donating the funds raised at the BGG.con Midnight Madness drawing, funds that amounted to $400.
• Ted Alspach of Bézier Games, who donated a case of Beer & Pretzels (12 copies) and a case of Rapscallion (30 copies!) – if the word “rapscallion” somehow makes it into modern Army slang, we’ll know who to blame.
• Steve Jones at Blue Panther LLC, who donated a half-dozen games, including Pulling Strings and Duck Duck Boom.
• All of the individual donors of both money and games, of whom I once again forgot to ask permission to use their names in a follow-up post, so I won’t call them out by name in case they wish to remain anonymous.
• All those who renewed their BGN membership during the drive to take advantage of my offer to redirect $10 of each such payment toward Games for Soldiers.
• Dan Yarrington at Myriad Games in Salem, NH for once again handling the order and kicking extra bucks into my account to purchase another eight decent-sized games.

In 2008 I assembled roughly equal game packages to take an assembly line approach to the process. This year I purchased a half-dozen copies of various titles – Small World, Fits, Escalation, Wits & Wagers, Cheeky Monkey, R-Eco – but I didn’t create identical blocks of games. Instead, after looking up military addresses on AnySoldier.com, I sent units with 20-40 soldiers two or three games, units with ~60 soliders four or five games, and units with 80+ soldiers six or more games, often with duplicates. (With all those copies of Rapscallion I couldn’t avoid duplication unless I wanted to send out thirty packages!)

Why did I choose these games? For all sorts of reasons – they’re portable, they involve betting and feature push-your-luck mechanisms, they feature in-your-face combat, they have simple rules, they’re fun. Not every reason applies to every game, except for the last one, of course.

Ideally these packages will help spread the joy of modern games to new players, with the games being passed along from unit to unit until the pieces disintegrate or disappear, with soldiers creating substitute Fits pieces out of pretzels and Giants being permanently sidelined due to a regrettable token-flinging incident. And perhaps a soldier or two will return home and teach games to their friends and family, and some day, randomly, I’ll sit down at a table with one such person and we’ll play a game together. After all, isn’t it a small, small world…

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