The other guy's welcome

Hi there! My name is Randy Shipp, and I'm the other half of the Two Guys Gaming blog. I want to take a few minutes to introduce myself and talk about my hopes and dreams for TwoGG (yeah, I'm already pronouncing this thing TWOG). I hope that our readers, however many there end up being, will go easy on me at the beginning. I'm not an experienced, veteran blogger. My personal blog never really was able to get off the ground, so I'm counting on peer pressure in the form of Tim's great success at posting his session reports promptly to get me to stay on top of this. Your feedback will also go a long way toward keeping me on track.

I've played games in various forms since the early 1980s, including some wargames, roleplaying games, CCGs, console video games, computer games, Euro-style boardgames, and God knows what else. Perhaps as a result of all that gaming time, I'm a bit of a late bloomer, career-wise. I just graduated in December from the University of North Texas with a bachelor's degree in history and a minor in archaeology at the young age of 37. I'm currently preparing to go into an alternative teacher certification program here in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area to teach middle-school or high-school history and social studies. It's kind of nice to be doing this blog experiment with Tim, since he and I can fill some of the spaces between games with discussions of our parallel paths toward the teaching profession.

I want to thank Tim for inviting me to do this. After coming back to North Texas from Oregon, Tim talked about how he missed the Two Sides to the Coin blog that he'd done there. Since he and I often talked about playing more two-player games, it seemed a good idea to try to resurrect the concept here. There are challenges: he lives a fair distance from me (about a 35 minute drive), and his place is often the best place to play. He has a small child, after all. But so far we've had good discussions about the direction we'll take, the games we'll play, and the ground rules, and this past weekend a quickly e-mailed "Let's get this thing started!" was all it took to get us together across a table for a great afternoon of platoon-level WWII goodness, as you'll soon be able to read about.

Hopefully, you'll find something interesting in these musings on various two-player games. I suspect that much of what you'll find here will be in the area of conflict simulation, but I strongly suspect there will be forays into train games, Euro-games, abstracts, CCGs, and others. We're here to have fun and broaden our horizons, and we hope you enjoy the ride along with us. Thanks for reading.

Randy...