DinoWARS!
Bringing up DinoWARS in a previous blog entry got me thinking about why I didn't run it a second time. The toys themselves (rubber dinosaurs and plastic army men) are classic. The buildings, while neither expensive nor hard to make, really made for a great back drop for the game. (You can check out pictures of the results here.

As I mentioned before, I only really drew one player to the game, the other four were all folks I knew. They would have tried nearly any game once on my say so. That one player joined up late even, without the friends and family the game maybe wouldn't have even started.

Still, the basic premise of using toys for gaming is a sound one. Previous runs of Clay-O-Rama and Lego Pirate Battles have established that these sorts of games are viable at Winter War. I guess my main problem is that the DinoWARS rules just aren't very good. They're adequate, but they lack any sort of zing. As written DinoWARS is basically just move, shoot, move, chomp. Maybe what I need is to explore some other rules I could use, or devise an alternate set of rules myself. I think I'd really like something with some spiffy cards, maybe something like the initiative deck used in the old BattleMasters game.