The Right Group is About the Right People, Not the Right Games

I'm more entrenched in the board game hobby now than ever before.  My game closet is slowly but steadily running out of room, I spend a lot of free time lurking the forums here and elsewhere, and I regularly visit local hobby stores on my lunch break.

Yet, despite it being a pretty important aspect of the hobby, I rarely actually play board games.   

The wife and I moved to a new city almost three years ago -- a few hours drive from our home town -- so I could kickstart my career.  (One of the drawbacks of being an adult is that, when making important life decisions, playing with your friends tends to be a lower priority than increasing your wages.)  So now I'm much less able to play games with friends.  Unfortunately, that also means I've lost much of the influence I had on the types of games we play when I do visit.  

Around the time I first got interested in board games (about 2006), I'd occasionally join their game nights, where we'd play games like Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico, or The Princes of Florence.  Fine enough games, but nothing that set my world on fire.  They were missing a spark.  They didn't take me back to my childhood when my buddies and I would stay up all night playing Monopoly or HeroQuest or Risk. 
I decided I needed to inject some trashiness into the game nights and so picked up Fury of Dracula, Mall of Horror, Arkham Horror, and Twilight Imperium.  For the most part, these were hits which left indelible marks on the group's gaming consciousness.   We were more often opting for games that appealed to the inner child in all of us, the one who dreams of dog-fights in space or hunting vampires.

But, since I moved three years ago, my group of friends has splintered into two gaming groups: one that primarily plays GURPS (and I have no fucking idea what that is) and the other, who I tend to get together with when I'm home for a weekend, has moved towards family-friendly Euros like 7 Wonders and Stone Age.  (Maybe those marks I'd left weren't so indelible...)  Meanwhile, my tastes have gone in a third direction.

Though I still enjoy the FFG classics I bought back in the day, I'm getting less enchanted by sci-fi and fantasy tropes and more interested in playing out history via moderately complex wargames.  This was no more clear to me than last night when I received both Here I Stand (HiS) and RuneWars in the mail and I found myself much more excited that HiS has a Pregnancy Chart (!) on the board than I was with all the elaborate tokens and pieces in the coffin box put together.

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm for games like HiS is not shared by my friends.  Last weekend I talked to Rob, who always hosts our game nights:

Me: "I bought Here I Stand."

Rob: "What's that?"

Me: "It's a 6-player wargame that takes about 8 hours to play."

Rob: "You like buying games that will never get played, don't you."

Me (enticingly): "It's about the Protestant Reformaaaatioooooon."

Rob: "..."

And he's one of the guys who's usually more willing to try longer, meatier games.  (Though I have half-convinced the wife to give it a try if I ever need a sixth after telling her, "It's just like The Tudors!") 

Back when I first introduced modern Amertirash to the group, I was playing games with them all the time.  It was a transition but they were happy to go with the flow since I was able to make the progression gradual.  Fast forward to today, and swiping 7 Wonders off the table to drop down some GMT seems like it would be too jarring a transition.  I don't want to force-feed a game on my friends that's a full day's committment -- partly I don't want to be a total imposition and partly I don't want to fuck up my chances of ever getting a game like this to the table again.  (There's probably a game that would make a good intermediate step.  Struggle of Empires, maybe?)

No matter how I try to sell it, my shiny new HiS will be a tough one to get to the table.  I've decided to try and scratch the wargame itch a bit with some games that can be played solo.  (I recently traded for Under the Lily Banners and Labyrinth: The War on Terror.)  But, of course, playing games solo just isn't the same.  It doesn't truly scratch the itch but rather makes the itch all the more apparent.

Maybe someday I'll feel inclined to venture out into the local gaming community and find people already playing HiS right here (apparently Regina, Saskatchewan has a very organized gaming community) but, really, I'd rather just play crap like Stone Age with friends.  The choice between playing the games I want or playing with the people I want is really no choice at all.

But the fact that I'm having to even consider that choice makes me long for the days when I had it all.