Empires & Puzzles: End of Season 5

Welcome,

I have always been a gamer and game history enthusiast.  Aside from the endless board games and card games as a kid, I got into Dungeons and Dragons around 1982 (age 16), and GM'd games all the way through college.  Boy we had some adventures and memorable moments that we could talk about for years to come.  But it wasn't all RPGs ... when I knew there was some odd game going on at the sci-fi club or the local game shops, I would pop in to see what new rules and game mechanics the designers were coming up with.  I recall some epic sessions of Rise and Decline of the Third Reich, the fascination of maps of real places, well-researched scenarios, hundreds of little unit chips, resolving whole lines of attrition battles, armor breakthroughs, trying to hold the beachheads.  Or just playing 500 Rummy with my Mom.  It's all good.  ;-)

By the 1990s, free time became scarce for me and video games had largely replaced the in-person game sessions.  Whether I was on some chess server late at night or running what few games I could afford (like Master of Magic, SSI adventures, the latest Civ) on my own PC, or writing my own little shareware projects (Zombie Castle, The Adventures of Shrimp E. Shrimp, Nemesis), or game projects that were my main paying job (Beat the House 3, Caesars Palace Video Poker), gaming was always the perfect escape.  Anyone who says gaming is lazy must not be getting the mental exercise of strategy, tactics and intense problem solving.  

I have seen people focus so hard on a chess board that they almost pass out.  Heck, I have felt my own head pounding, eyes burning trying to find the move that would get me out of a crunch.  Even on a movie set (Master and Commander) there were epic games of chess, dominoes, pool, and some card games that felt totally made up.  Or were they?  Was someone just conning me, or were we tapping into an amazing shared cultural history?

I had a pretty good library of books on the dice games of the worlds, party games for kids, parlor games for grown-ups, alternate rules for popular games, games of the Native American people, mancala variations, the psychology of games, half a shelf of books on chess mastery, at least 200 pounds of RPG sourcebooks, even the game theory analysis behind some of the classics.

For video games, I mostly settled on Minecraft.  Best $20 I ever spent.  Over a decade now of testing new modded worlds, new updates, revisiting old fantasy realms of mine.  I had a blog about that for a few years, and I posted about 300 episodes of those adventures on YouTube.  But there were still other games, and I was always exploring new rule sets and ideas.  I just never let myself get sucked into any other video game; there just wasn't time to put into them, and I always had the issue that the latest top games did not run on my computers that were always a few years old.

Now, warp forward to today's Internet, with billions of images and documents at our fingertips.  I can delve into museum collections halfway around the world, fragments of games from archaeological digs, auctions of gorgeous Victorian-era board games, modern analysis, print-and-play archives, BoardGameGeek, DriveThruRPG, actual blogs from the designers of some of our modern best-sellers, endless channels of great Youtubers unboxing games, doing deep strategy sessions, or filming 2-hour and 3-hour game nights.

Ironically, now that I spend so much time on computers for my daily grind, board games offer an escape BACK to reality.  Get off the computer for a while, to roll some dice, have a blast with my girlfriend, other gamer friends.

So what is one guy going to contribute to all that?  Just filling my head with thousands of bits and then going to bed is not very fulfilling.  I am not someone who is going to make videos about this.  But I can share the pieces I do find, notes from game sessions, test results, first impressions, strategy tips as I discover them.  For the past few months (COVID-19 living) I have accumulated what I have to say is an astounding collection of resources, links, and research.

So, I will focus mostly on board games and card games, though I may comment on a fun app if I find one, because I am always testing things out.  I hope to share some of the amazement that I still get after 40+ years of gaming, a fascination for the old and ongoing wonder at all the creative new games that are being produced.