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Anthony BoydellUnited Kingdom
Newent. Glos
Unspecified
Every homo sapiens needs an outbuilding within the curtelage of their property
Welcome...to my Shed!
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Maureen Hiron, one of the gaming world's true greats, died yesterday at the grand age of 80. Maureen was best known in the 1980s for a variety of mass market, abstract games such as Continuo and Cavendish - but, if you're a Bridge player, was much more famous in that field: an International level player, writer and newspaper columnist. If you want to know more 'facts' then wander over to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maureen_Hiron ; however, I have Maureen stories of my own to tell:
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I first met her at a presentation of some kind at Essen Spiel in the late noughties; this short, be-baseball-capped old lady huffed into an adjacent seat and started telling me about her upcoming meetings with Hasbro, a million selling project with US retailers, how great living in Portugal is and that she drives an Aston Martin. I think, for about 2 minutes, I tried pitching Bloody Legacy to her as something for a big supermarket brand but she was too busy telling me how much money she made to help me pay off my mortgage./pic6915128.jpg)
We'd often see her pass by the booth, year on year, and we'd give her a hearty halloo in that 'She is someone important so be nice...' kind of way; I think we were quite intimidated, like we were whenever we bumped into Francis Tresham.
Maureen was, undeniably, an outstanding - if eccentric - force within the Industry; exasperating (the conversation was usually pretty one-sided) and admirable in equal measure. Hailing from a bygone era of our hobby, she seemed rather nonplussed by most modern day 'Euro' output - too complicated and too fiddly. She preferred, instead, the elegance of a pack of cards or a colourful grid with simple mechanisms rooted in the traditional; this, of course, is how most of the people in the World regard games whereas we - with our resource management, worker placement, dice drafting, deck building, miniature-heavy and over-involved bunkum - are an aberration. This - the general market approach - is why she had a home in the Sun and drove an Aston Martin and why I don't.
Life and Games (but mostly games) from Tony Boydell: Father, Grandfather, Husband and Independent UK Game Designer.
- [+] Dice rolls
