So what is a weekend?

What is THE weekend?

Let's go with the easy one first. a weekend is the last few days of the week, Saturday and Sunday (yes, Sunday is the LAST day of the week, not the first. How could the first day of the week be the last day of the weekend? That way lies madness, people). In many parts of the world, these two days are often set aside from the week as leisure time if you work a "typical work week" of Monday through Friday.

I am, today, one of the lucky ones that gets those days off regularly. That has not always been the case though. People that work in the service industry, restaurants especially, often have to work irregular schedules because those stores are expected to be open each and every day. I used to work such a job, as a baker and overnight stocker at a grocery store. It was a nightmare.

Imagine the horrors of scheduling gaming when the times you are available are the times when everyone else is at work, only having two days off in a row maybe once a month, and never on the actual weekend. It was a lonely and embittering. experience.

So anyway that's A weekend, what's THE weekend. Well, honestly that's something that's going to be different for each person you ask, right? For me THE weekend is the weekend of my wedding, where we had a huge wedding party and played The Resistance: Avalon. That was probably not THE weekend for my parents though, who kept asking me if "The red guy was good or not" and outing themselves as spies on the first turn.

Seeing as THE weekend is so nebulous then I am going to go in a different direction. What is a game I've played that's actually taken a weekend to play?

When I was younger and had the time, I spent a few weekends in college playing roleplaying games, and there were even a couple of Risk and Axis & Allies in highschool that technically spanned a weekend due to sleepovers. The best game that I've ever taken a weekend to play, though, that has to be....

Through the Ages: A Story of Civilization

So I first rediscovered a love for boardgames when I first moved to the town I currently live in. A friend of mine bought the three big Settlers of Catan sets: the original game, the ocean one, and the good one (cities and knights). My roomate at the time and I hosted him and our other in town friends for Catan nights regularly. Everytime though we'd have a fight about which sets to us. I always wanted to play with cities and knights. Everyone else always wanted to just use the base set and the "little boats" because the rest was too complicated.

Truth was though, even that was not really enough for me. I could see the edges of that game way too easily. The ways it could be broken (like, jam as many of the green upgrades as fast you can) and the ways it was lacking (primarily its limited scope and crazily based on how the dice fall). So I began to look around online for games that I could buy that were more like the strategy video games that I love to play.

This is the search that first led me to boardgamegeek, and on top of the list at the time sat the proverbial grail of my quest.

In a lot of ways Through the Ages is nothing at all like Civilization. There's no map at all. Warfare is crazy abstracted and there's no tech tree, really. Tech is instead represented by cards that you take from a center row.

But what it does capture is the feeling of taking a group from absolutely nothing to the space age that is, to me, the core of what makes Civilization great.

You have your own board with little citizens on it that can be assigned to work in mines or farms, or become soldiers or librarians. Once you've paid science to actually learn it you can spend ore to move a citizen there to work.

There's worker revolts, revolutions, leaders that live for thousands of years and treaties to boot.

So, all that means it takes a LOOOONG time to play. It can take days. A weekend even. I've spent a few battling my roommates with Napoleon or out pacing them culturally with Michelangelo.

I don't have the time to do that anymore, but I hope someday when my son is old enough we can just set out a game and leave it lie, playing whenever we can.

Stay tuned for my 2030 entry Game I played over the week.

Check out Archdruid's contest! Though, honestly I'm not sure my entry is even in time...