Blogs.....and Boardgames

My first Blog, and it’s about…..Boardgames. These aren’t your Daddy’s Boardgames, no Monopoly or Life here. You won’t see much about Checkers or Chess either. I’m talking about some really geeky stuff. They have a website for people like us it’s called WWW.Boardgamegeek.com. If you were to go there and start reading about just a few of the “Hot” games right now you would bump into a lot that will leave you saying “This is really complicated”. But that is the point, immersive complex games with very in-depth mechanics and strategy, covering themes from the standard Fantasy and Sci-fi genres to obscure even mundane themes like Sheering Sheep.

Most people I talk to refer to Boardgames as “bored” games, and I can see where that is coming from. When I was growing up we had the typical family boardgame get togethers usually around Thanksgiving and Christmas. We would play stuff like Life or Monopoly or Scrabble. I always considered these games “boring” but of course as a kid I never considered why they were boring, I just wanted to get out of playing them so I could go off and play video games. Looking back now I see that these types of “classic” Boardgames were not grabbing my attention because they were either too simplistic or required little if any imagination. Even the Flashier Gimmick type games like Mousetrap or Hungry, Hungry Hippos were too silly or lacking in depth to spark my interest for long. I was pretty much resigned to believing that the old, flat, 2-D world of Boardgames would never compare to the exciting dynamic new world of Video Games. Then two things happened, Video Games started to get lame, there were so many bad games being churned out, eventually this lead to the video game crash of '84 and video game cartridges weren’t selling and ended up in landfills, and I was bored. The next thing that happened was a friend of the family brought a new boardgame over. "Yeah a new "bored" game" I thought sarcastically. This new game was called "Dark Tower" and it was amazing. It was the perfect way to grab a video game geek's attention because the game was run by an electronic black tower, which sat ominously in the center of the game board. The tower had lighted pictures and sound effects that grabbed your attention. The game had very cool fantasy art that sold the theme very well and stoked your imagination. There also was very basic concepts of resource management that gave you (or at least a young boy) an intellectual challenge. Needless to say this thing set my brain on fire, I could not get enough. The game was very expensive for the time, $50, and even though my family liked the game, there was no way my parents were gonna buy it. So when this friend of the family moved away I did not get to play Dark Tower again until years later when I was making my own money and was able to purchase an old beat up copy for myself. As I grew up I had a changed attitude about boardgames. Through the years I have always kept an eye out for those rare games that offer a more immersive, imaginative, and challenging experience. Most of the time it was a fruitless search. New games would come out and draw some of my attention but somehow or another would not measure up. That all changed a few years ago when I was having a conversation with some friends of mine about boardgames and we all remembered with great fondness "that old Dark Tower game". That sparked it, and before I knew I was being shown a new world of gaming, and my friends Scott and Ed were finding new things too. Before long the three of us were hip deep in a plethora of gaming nirvana.

Like I said this nirvana began with a discussion that involved reminiscing about Dark Tower and soon Scott and Ed where introducing me to Axis and Allies. I had never been in to World War II stuff or wargames that simulated it, but it was a lot of fun and exactly what I had been waiting for years to play, it had the depth and complexity I was looking for. I returned the favor by exposing Scott and Ed to Magic the Gathering, not really a boardgame, it’s a collectable card game. But it has a great fantasy theme and teaches some basic tactics that we use in the boardgames we play. After our initial buying frenzy we now approach Magic more like boardgamers by sticking to only buying and playing with the pre-constructed decks. On a side note Magic was not Scott’s first Fantasy gaming exposure a few years before I played Axis and Allies with him and Ed we had a short stint of intense sessions playing Warhammer Quest, a wonderful blend of boardgames meets Dungeons and Dragons, Scott and I loved this game. When Ed came on board and we started things with Axis and Allies and Magic, but we quickly started looking for other games more in this vein.

It was such a flurry of new games that I can’t really remember what came first but before I knew it I was being exposed to all kinds of new games; Card games like Blue Moon, Citadels and Colossal Arena. World Conquest/War Games like Risk 2210, Civilization, Axis and Allies expansions like Pacific and Europe. Then we found great gaming companies like Fantasy Flight Games, Days of Wonder and Rio Grande. Fantasy Flight brought great games like Runebound, Descent, Warcraft, Fury of Dracula, and Arkham Horror. Rio Grand was responsible for my first exposure to Euro-Games like Carcassonne, Puerto Rico, and Caylus. Days of Wonder with fun titles like Ticket to Ride, Shadows over Camelot and Memoir ’44.

All these games just scratch the surface of all the gaming experiences that I will be talking about in this blog. I hope to give those that read this blog some education and exposure to these wonderful games, whether you’ve played some of them and are just looking for more of the same. Or if you are one of those unfortunates that is still stuck in a world of Monopoly and Sorry, consider this a beginning to a better world.