Recently there was a thread on the go by a fellow doing a rather long good bye in which he said that he was leaving to play " Farmville " and thus giving up Chess. I also have a couple of games  in my PC that I like to play such as Ship Simulator, Train Simulator and Silent Hunter III ( all downloaded from discs ). However these are mainly for use during the long cold Winters when things may get a little boring. Chess is Number 1 !!!  

True dat.

Thanks for leaving the post Crazychessplaya.

You philanderer!  How could you cheat on chess like that?

Thanks for the post Joseph-S. However ... truth be told sometimes I also will get on the internet and play Klondike Solitaire or even Texas-hold-em Poker. Well I must say that I'm glad to have revealed that, Whew ---  

Civilization is my secret "other interest", as well as Call of Duty...

Civilization is one of the best alternatives to chess around. I have spent hours in front of the computer playing in the past. I try to limit my playing now though.

Thanks for the recent posts. Yes there are a lot of fun games out there and of course one certainly can use up a lot of time with them. Plus there are other internet activities that demand time such as Youtube. The amount and variety of music, the items of historical interest and on and on, Youtube is nearly endless. So much info, so little time  lol.   

Well, I have to say that I know what you mean. We only have so much free time on our hands and chess may not be all we're interested in. At the moment, I'm thinking about taking a short break from chess to play "Resident Evil Revelations". However, this would only last for a week or so, then I'd be back. A good computer game is a nice short-term experience, but chess is for life. 

Thanks for the post Bubatz. I haven't heard much about the Resident Evil Revelations game. In my case I also have a number of threads on the go here at this site and I try to keep things updated.

Well I nearly ended up having to play Farmville after all due to a major problem with this machine. Some odd item got into this old Computer and nearly destroyed it. I had to download Windows XP again and with a bit of goodluck the old machine is working again. I lost some files and the games that I had in the Computer are gone but I can replace those things. For a while there I didn't think that even games were still within the capacity left in this Computer. So lets be careful out there !   

Recently I have been seeing ads stating that Farmville 2 is now available for free. If the fellow that started the original thread were still around he could give us a review of both of these games.  

Recently I was looking thru " World War II " magazine and I came across an unusual ad, it was for Monopoly. This was not the regular Game but a special edition entitled " America's World War II - We're All In This Together ". At the very least this version would be a collector's item as nearly all of the squares on the board have been changed.

There are lots of theme edition monopoly games.

@posts 6 and 7: Civilization has been distracting me from chess lately. So has posting in the forums here.

nope.....

Thanks for the recent posts.

Years ago, back before the internet, some people that were interested in History could buy board-games that were based on actual historical events. For example one of these games that I got quite some time ago is entitled " 1914 ". This game is based on the Western Front of World War I and comes with a map covering the area in question from the Swiss Border up to the English Channel. The map is of a rather large size and is best placed on a good-sized Dinning Room table. The main drawback with this game is that it seems to take nearly 1/2 of a day to set up correctly.

As I mentioned above I nearly lost the use of my old PC some months back due to a technical problem. So far I haven't got around to downloading the games that I had in the machine before it went blank. I did however download my Chessmaster Game so I am able to play against that game from time to time ( one of these days I will get the other games back too and have even more fun ! ).