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Thoughts after 20 Years in the Hobby

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08 Sep 2020 19:19 #313852 by ChristopherMD
20 years give or take a few months in the board game hobby. I was more into CCG's prior.

Reiner Knizia has been my favorite designer since year one. My first group became big fans of Ra and Lord of the Rings. It wasn't until a couple years later that I tried Euphrat & Tigris which I consider a masterpiece game.

I think RoboRally and Carcassonne are the only two games to have stayed in my library all these years.

Arkham Horror 2nd Edition is the only FFG expansion-fest game that lasted more than a couple years for me.

$275 for Incursion 2nd Edition back in 2013 is the most I ever spent on a Kickstarter by far and I still have the game.

DungeonQuest is the only dungeon crawler that got it right. I wish more designs were influenced by it.

That's all for now.

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08 Sep 2020 22:26 #313853 by Jexik
20 years ago I was in a 3rd edition D&D game that met weekly, and I had played Catan, but I probably played more video games than any of it. Getting into Heroscape in 2007 was the first time I probably considered myself a board game hobbyist, and at first it was just 'scape. So even though I've been in and out of tabletop I'd only give myself a 13 year pin.

I missed the Knizia craze, although I did like Medici when I tried it out. Rob Daviau has his name on some of my all-time favorite games (Heroscape, Risk Legacy, and Pandemic Legacy Season 1), but I feel like he can't carry a design on his own.

I like Roborally a lot if you stick to a small board. Carcassonne I respect but am pretty terrible at.

X-Wing was probably my longest FFG dalliance.

I've never spent more than like $50 on a kickstarter, but I have bought Root and the first expansion from stores after they had been kickstarted.

The only deckbuilder that got it right is Dominion. Puzzle Strike came pretty close because it's basically Dominion.
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09 Sep 2020 00:06 #313858 by ubarose
20 years ago I was directing a play while trying to keep my 18 month old contained in a pack-n-play in the theatre. There were no games. Just sweet, sweet sleep.
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09 Sep 2020 00:32 #313860 by Andi Lennon
20 years ago I had long since abandoned my childhood and early-teen touchstones of BG and RPG obsession to focus on doing music whilst still enjoying the honeymoon years of what i'll generously call a 'vision quest' that eventually went on to rob me of most of my possessions and teeth.

The odd dalliance with Catan et al aside, I returned around three years ago and it's been a blast catching up. I'm in deep now but ya'll are lovely company.
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09 Sep 2020 00:45 #313861 by Shellhead
20 years ago, my primary gaming focus was tabletop role-playing games. At that time, I was running a long Legend of the Five Rings campaign, which was in the process of expanding from 6 players to 13, after which another player volunteered to GM so we could split the group in half.

Depending on how you count things, I have been in this hobby for nearly 50 years. I don't mean that I was playing Candyland and counting that as our hobby, I mean my dad got obsessed with Acquire and taught me (and my mom) how to play around the time I was learning to read, just so he would always have at least enough players for a 3-player game. He bought me other board games throughout grade school and into junior high, including proto-AmeriTrash games like Battle Cry and Dogfight. By my mid-teens, I was playing AH war games with a close friend, and also playing early rpgs like Gamma World and Villains & Vigilantes.

But my gaming gradually got divided, pulled into several different directions, that included CCGs, LARP, and PC games. Until the pandemic, I was still playing one CCG on a nearly weekly basis. Aside from that, I usually go through long phases where I am either running an rpg campaign or playing boardgames semi-often. Again due to the pandemic, my only recent gaming has been either solitaire board games or a PC game.

I co-designed a mediocre board game that got published by White Wolf. But the peak of my whole gaming career might have been Strategic L5R at GenCon, maybe in 2000 or 2001. It was a six-hour event that combined CCGs and role-playing into an unusual sort of wargame. Part of what makes that memory so special is the impossibility of ever re-creating that experience. There were 13 teams of 6 players, a team of judges, and a CCG that has since been radically changed by the current publisher.
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09 Sep 2020 09:34 #313870 by hotseatgames
20 years ago I was playing Unreal Tournament, Quake, and Rainbow Six. I never thought about board games until maybe 2007 when I quite randomly bought Descent: Journeys in the Dark and got quite addicted to it.

Now my sons obsessively play Rainbow Six.
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09 Sep 2020 10:08 #313872 by Jackwraith
Like Shellhead, I got in early, playing Revolt on Antares (still have my original copy) and Panzerblitz alongside AD&D and Gamma World. I stuck with the RPGs through college (where I discovered Talisman! And Cosmic Encounter! And Dune! And Space Hulk!) and then this odd little game called Magic: The Gathering...

So, 20 years ago, I was reaching the end of my MTG tournament career and swinging back hard into GW (I think the last count of fully-fledged (i.e. thousands of points) armies/fleets/gangs was 6 40K, 5 Fantasy, 6 BFG, 3 Necromunda, 2 Mordheim, 3 Epic, and a Man O' War partridge.) I had had brief orbital intersections with a couple Knizia games (T&E, Ra) and enjoyed them, but was still firmly into the 28mm guys. But my playing group started to drift apart and I was hauling out my old copy of Talisman more and more often, until I tired of it and traded it for a bunch of new games, several of which were by this little company that had produced an amazing minis game called War of the Ring...

I loved AH 2nd Ed, but traded it. I'm not sure that any dungeon crawler has really gotten it right, but it certainly wouldn't be DungeonQuest. We did play everything produced for Descent, 1st Ed, for years, though. My favorite deckbuilders are Rune Age and Tyrants of the Underdark because theme is still important to me. I've only been involved with a couple Kickstarters, as I have a general distaste toward that kind of approach but am willing to get in on things like Root's expansion, Pax Pamir, and the last couple Tiny Epic games.

I think the only real "collectors' item"-type games I still have are an original copy of Dune that I traded a copy of LotR Trivia for and a copy of The Hellgame, which has long been out of print and has no hope of revival.
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09 Sep 2020 10:20 - 09 Sep 2020 10:20 #313873 by Sagrilarus
I used to say you could tell how long someone had been playing D&D by looking at their dice.

- If they were new they'd have the basic set and maybe a couple of spare six-siders stolen from their Risk box.

- If they had a couple of years under them they'd have a matched set of fancy dice with a leather pouch and a little felt pad to roll them on.

- Years of playing meant they had a crazed patchwork of dice, perhaps a few matching, that were in the bottom of their bag under their books and papers, damn hard to find.

- The grizzled veteran has about ten dice, not matched, including one d20 that is "reserved for when I'm in deep shit, because it rolls a lot of 19s for some reason."


I'm trying to decide if there's a similar effect for boardgamers, and at this point I really only have a couple of data points to go on. This thread promises more. I like it.

I just passed through a move of houses that resulted in me putting my hands on every single boardgame I owned in a single day. Given space constraints it made sense to put them in two piles instead of one, and I ended up with a few hundred dollars in store credit from the sale of games I no longer needed, duplicates in my group or games that, in spite of being good, just weren't ever going to get played. I think the grizzled veteran gamer is best identified by what they used to own, not what they have now.

By the way my copy of Incursion was the result of a math trade, $12 in shipping. First edition with is clearly less content, but it fits in one box and is still a lot of fun.
Last edit: 09 Sep 2020 10:20 by Sagrilarus.

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09 Sep 2020 10:31 #313875 by the_jake_1973
I have seen such an explosion in board and miniature gaming in the last 20 years. I'd already been waist deep in it for 10 years prior with Avalon Hill hex gaming and BattleTech. 20 years ago I had been there and gone with Magic and frequently lamented letting all my alpha and beta cards go. I have seen the rise and fall and rise again of Blood Bowl which has been an interesting journey.

I still have a fondness for wargames, but will lean to a simpler C&C version since I can get many more games in during the same amount of time.

It is wonderful to see a fan resurgence of Man O War with the ease of 3d printing. Still a very niche following, but worth it.

The original Warhammer Quest remains my favorite dungeon crawler, especially with the extensive fan-produced content. Used with the Campaign book, it hits all the dice chucking notes I want it to.

Kickstarter has been an amazing avenue for games to get pushed out to the public. The opportunity it affords both designers and consumers has been pretty incredible. Not everything offered is great and there have been some campaigns with high drama to say the least. when something cool hits your radar, though, it can be a magic moment.

The rise of online boardgaming is an amazing advancement, especially for those of us who remember play by email or <shudder> snail mail. It has been fun playing Rallyman with the people here as it is a game that would never get to my table at home.

Here's to another 20 years of increased diversity and representation in content, designers, and players.
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09 Sep 2020 12:25 #313884 by Nodens
20 years ago I was playing RoboRally, Mah Jongg and Acquire regularly. All games I still play and like. RoboRally for me works best with 8+ people, a track that is set up with a longish discussion and around 10 hours of spare time to race which is unlikely to ever happen again. That amount of free time is going elsewhere nowadays.
I tried the occasional new game but they just didn't do it for me. Older titles did, like the second edition of Twilight Imperium which I got to play once around that time. Until a couple of years later my first play of Shadows over Camelot made me go and get it the next day.
I ran my best Call of Cthulhu Campaign then (centered around the Fungi from Yuggoth). And yes, I still do have those dice for the important rolls (it's a pair of D10s of course).
Have never kickstarted and never will. Will play anything at least once, though, still.
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09 Sep 2020 13:02 #313887 by mezike
Two decades ago I was in a desert, both literally as well as figuratively. I was living in the Middle East despairing at the deflating balloon of the promising career that had brought me there and jumping ship into another business that would end up being even more soul-destroying. My long-term almost-engaged relationship had soured (my feelings not hers for added discomfort) and I was falling out with various family and friends who were taking advantage of my usually sunny disposition at a time when I needed to receive support rather than give it. Somewhere in another world was a storage crate with Catan and a bunch of old school GW 'specialist' games, all of which were incredibly far from my mind - gaming was the least of my concerns.

Fifteen years ago I had ripped apart my life and started anew. I was flitting between Cyprus and the UK, I had progressed through an entire other career in the intervening time, was loved-up with a new sweetheart who I would eventually settle and start a family with, and gaming was back on the menu - although I admit with shame that I fell deep into the zeitgeist and woke up one morning wondering why I had started collecting a huge stack of mediocre, almost unplayable, BGG recommended titles. I started going to game clubs, was joining in on hobby forums, organising maths trades. It all felt new and shiny and the (gasp) dozens of new titles waiting to be collected were always so exciting.

A decade ago I now had school-age kids at home, a really terrible job that was bridging the end of the recession but was at least paying the bills, and had found a regular gaming club that I still go to today (well, was going to up to six months ago). I had sorted out the poor habits I had been indoctrinated into when I first got into the modern hobby so out went the amorphous beige Euros and in came the likes of BSG and Arkham 2E. I followed the early days of F:AT although I never got involved, maybe for well or ill, as my displeasure with people in the hobby in general meant that I quit the mainstream and didn't really engage with anyone outside of my gaming buddies. But oh what fun times - I made solid friends for life during this period and was enjoying my time spent playing and discovering games maybe more than ever.

Five years ago and my life was settled. I had shifted career again and finally found my calling on a path which has yielded no little success that I am still on today. Home life was bliss. Gaming was amazing. My kids were just reaching the age where they could play some of my more complex games but were still finding joy in just toying around with the components in various boxes and making up their own rule-less activities with them. Quite often I would turn up to game nights only to find pieces of completely different games mixed in together or that my carefully built decks had been entirely deconstructed, and I loved every moment of it.

Right now today life continues to go up and down. I had some low moments around two years back that then bounced back pretty quickly. My son is a bigger gaming nerd than I am and I struggle to keep up with his demand for game-time. Recent times have been terrible for all but life goes on. Finding new friends on digital platforms has been a high-point, and I've spent more time with my kids than I have done since I took a year off for family time when they were babies. Games are better now than they have ever been, or maybe I just imagine it this way; maybe I have just found my tribe. You guys and gals are all amazing, keep on being you.

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09 Sep 2020 13:38 #313892 by ubarose
If we go back to about 22 years ago (before baby), Al & I owned about 2 dozen games between us. We mostly played Talisman, Settlers, Merchant of Venus, Ultra Marines, Wiz-War and History of the World.

We had also played, and were looking for copies of our own of Cosmic Encounter, El Grande, Ursuppe, and Tales of the Arabian Nights. I would have had recently purchased El Caballero by accident, thinking I had scored a copy of El Grande, because the boxes looked very similar, and been bitterly disappointed that it wasn't. We now have copies of Primordial Soup, Tales of the Arabian Nights and Cosmic Encounter, but we never did get a copy of El Grande.
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09 Sep 2020 16:50 #313916 by Msample
My first twenty years or so of gaming were pretty much all hex and counter ZOC wargames with very few exceptions. I dabbled with the old SPI WAR OF THE RING, but other than that, Avalon Hill was 90% of my purchases until The Gamers and GMT arrived on the scene. A lot of ASL, and OCS back then. Towards the end of that 20 years, card driven games such as Hannibal and We the People came on the scene and started to make a big impact.

At the very end of that first 20/start of the last 20 years , I became more aware of non wargames. I still remember being bored to tears by a friend trying to explain Princes of Florcence to the point where I simply walked away and played something else. I don't remember my first pure Euro - it was probably played at a WBC back in the Hunt Valley days . Gradually I became more of a gaming omnivore, although more towards the heavy side of games vs abstracts . In recent years I have moved away from monster wargames for the most part . Even though I am now retired, the extra time afforded doesn't make me want to dive back into such long games either.
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09 Sep 2020 17:32 #313921 by Gary Sax
20 years ago I was deep in my rejection of all things board game or nerd except video games. That lasted for a long time.
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09 Sep 2020 21:04 #313929 by Andi Lennon
Weird how despite the wide range of tastes and life experiences on display the universal touchstone of Talisman seems to be the tie that binds. That thing is immortal. I'll see you all again on the plane of peril. Long may it roll to move and reign.
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