Sound Retreat

I recently attended a gaming retreat with several good friends and had a blast hanging out, playing different games, and eating and drinking all manner of good (and bad!) things. We had envisioned this as our first post-pandemic gathering but unfortunately, it appears that might have been wishful thinking.

A few highlights from the weekend:

• We did a booster draft of the new Dungeons and Dragons-themed Magic the Gathering set, Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. While I enjoy playing Magic, I’ve never been very good at it and it’s been years since I followed it closely. That said, even I was really looking forward to this set, if only for the art. Unfortunately, a lot of the art appeared dark and cramped to my (admittedly, older) eyes. It was pretty nifty to finally see explicitly D&D branded cards, but many mechanics seemed pretty out there. I’ll leave it to my MtG playing friends to weigh in on how the new set plays.
• Ghosts of Saltmarsh. My same friend who DM’d our awesome Strahd campaign is running this and I’m trying my hand at playing a tank: Sturmagant the Goliath fighter. Although I had the 1e module U1 Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, I never ran it and never even read the subsequent installments, so I’m coming in cold and really looking forward to playing through this campaign.
• Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. We play this D&D game a couple of times a year. It’s a cool adventure run by a great DM, but so complicated that it’s hard to go so long between sessions. I’m hoping we can play more frequently in the next year.
• Wingspan. Several of my friends have really gotten into the new board game scene, and I keep telling myself I need to try one of these out. A couple of years ago I read an intriguing article about the development of Wingspan, and finally had a chance to play it. It’s great looking, and like all of these new board games plays quickly and offers a ton of strategic choices. I really want to try this again.
• Sly Flourish’s Fantastic Adventures for 5e. One of our regular players wanted to try DMing for the first time, so we played through one of the adventures from this anthology. It was a crazy collection of characters: I played a tabaxi rogue, another friend played a goblin rogue. Our DM rolled with all of it, and we had a pretty fun adventure. I hope he runs more!
• Into the Interface. I had a chance to run another installment of my Traveller game, “the Ross Charter.” I had a good time, but it was the last session of the retreat and energy was a little low for some players. Like Waterdeep, i probably suffers from a little too much complexity and too much time between sessions. I’ve wanted to do some Zoom games again, so maybe I’ll try to get something on the books for October.

All in all, I had a blast and I’m already thinking about our next retreat!