To Arms! To Arms!

Back in the day (for purposes of today's blog, "the day" is back in 1984, when I was in the 4th grade and only slightly less mature than I am now), I received the coolest game ever invented: Crossbows & Catapults. (For the record, the other coolest games were "Thunder Road", "Fireball Island", and "Cops & Robbers", but we'll discuss those another time...). In this game, two opponents set up their small Medieval armies (complete with towers, walls, and seige weaponry) on either end of a large, flat playing field. Once set up, you proceed to pummel your opponent's stronghold with plastic ammunition launched from your siege weaponry....what could be more fun than that? Alas, like so many other bits of my childhood (the afore mentioned games, the original S'Mores cereal, etc.) this excellent game went the way of the proverbial Dodo.

Or did it?

A few months before Christmas, I conveniently saw this product in the local Target. My jaw dropped, my hands got all sweaty, and I felt a stirring...yes, my wife was looking even more gorgeous than usual that day. But once the shock of my wife's unearthly beauty passed*, I realized that this game, while cosmetically different, was indeed the same game I'd grown up with (though the actual, physical remnants of the game I'm sad to say, ultimately wound up in the hands of my younger brother, thereby sealing its fate. Leaving something with him is like letting a ravenous wolf babysit your barbecue-sauce lathered toddler...it's just asking for trouble). So much "reinventing your childhood" toy marketing has been waged against today's unsuspecting parents recently (G.I. Joe reissues, anyone? Transformers? My Little Pony? He-Man?), but most of it left me unfazed. While I was certainly a fan of those toy lines when I was a youngster (save for My Little Pony, unless they were being marked, tagged and hunted by my Cobra tanks), their reappearance had little overall effect on me. But "Crossbows & Catapults"...even as a boy I'd had obscure tastes, and to think that someone else had also liked this game enough to actually re-issue it was almost like having my entire childhood validated.

Needless to say, the game went onto my Wish List, and -- praise be the In-Laws -- I received every last piece under the Christmas tree!

The game is simple: as I described above, you pretty much set up little plastic castles and destroy them with toy siege weapons. Back in "the day", your armies were the Vikings and the Barbarians (I always played the Barbarians, because the troops looked cooler). Nowawdays, in this Tolkien-savvy world, the armies consist of Humans and Orcs (I like the new armies better, and naturally play the Orcs, since they remind me of myself, gnarly teeth and all). The rules are incredibly simple, and all movement and distance is measured in inches (which reminds just a bit of Warhammer, even if Crossbows & Catapults...or "Battlegrounds", as it's now called...is an infinitely simpler system, as it is designed for kids.)

The best part? Shortly after Christmas, my 5-year-old son and I broke out the game and played it on the table out in the living room which seconds as my desk. We didn't worry too much about the rules (he's 5, come on), but just shot each other's castles with the new, super-cool weapons like the Orc Triple Crossbow, the Trebuchet and the Battering Ram. We had an absolute blast. The game got put away, but then again this weekend we broke it out again, and this time my 13-year old daughter played against my son. Though she may not ever admit it, they both had tons of fun (even if my son got a little..."possessive" of some of the ammunition pieces). What was fun for me was watching them: here were my kids, enjoying something I'd had when I was their age. It brought back good memories...which means it was a present well worth getting. :)



* Give me a break, it's a like a DC 22 Save, and we all know how low my Wisdom score is...