My board gaming journey, pt. I

    Something a bit different today than my normal reflections. I thought I would delve a little bit more into a topic that is not necessarily theological in nature. I am a real person, and not some ethereal doctor in an ivory tower who gets to smoke a pipe and contemplate the infinite mysteries all day. So, today, I thought I would delve into one of my personal hobbies: board gaming. 

    Now, do not tune me out because you hear "board gaming" and immediately default in your brain to your brother overturning a table with Monopoly money flying everywhere because the game has gone on for hours and overturning the table was the only option left other than murder. Most people, including myself at one time, thought of board games as those boring or frustrating games that seem stuck in 1952. You know the usual suspects: Clue!, Monopoly, Scrabble, Chess, maybe even more saccharine games like Life or Candy Land, i.e. those games that everyone owned at some point in their childhood that were played on occasion but mostly only resided in some dark closet at the end of the hallway in your childhood home. In fact, if your parents are still living, they reside there still to this day next to the badminton rackets your grandmother got you for your birthday when you were 7. 

    I believed for many years precisely that about board games. When I played games from my teenage years onward, they were almost always computer games or occasionally a game of cards like cribbage. I always hated board games when I was kid. I thought it was because I sincerely disliked board games in general. I was pleasantly surprised a few years ago to learn that what I disliked were the actual classic games themselves and not board gaming as a group. While I do like chess, I always found games Monopoly ultimately pointless, particularly in those scenarios where no one can get a monopoly but no one is willing to trade, and so everyone is just tromping around the board for hours for no reason. I particularly detested Scrabble as a kid were all I could come up with were words like "pig" or "the" while my erudite aunt would come up with triple word scores for words like "jukebox" or "cazique" (I still think that's not a legit word to this day, even if it is in some old dictionary.)

    A few years ago, I started getting occasional clinical migraines again. I have to be really careful playing video games with a lot of high def graphics or flashing images. Really, I have basically given up on computer gaming, as it's just not worth the risk of triggering a full-on migraine. This left me a bit sad because I did like a good occasional computer game. I did not play them often, but I did enjoy them particularly in the dead of winter when I was stuck inside.

    One particularly nasty winter a few years back, I was bored out of my mind. I wanted to play a game, but as I had had to give up computer gaming, I was listening to a podcast I frequent. The podcast was on an entirely different topic entirely. For whatever reason, the presenter that week that usually talked about serious history topics like Napoleon or Ancient Greece or whatever did a mini series on the history of board games. I almost did not download those podcasts on to my phone app because I saw the topic and was like, "Yuck. Who wants to listen to the history of Monopoly?" Being a cold winter day, I downloaded the first one anyway.

    The presenter must have known that the audience would likely have a gut reaction much like my own because out of the box, he opened with a monologue as he was walking around a modern gaming convention in some major city. He happened upon a board game producer talking about how much board games have evolved since the early days of Clue! and Checkers. This random dude spit out a laundry list of names of new games that had come out in the last year and were dropping for the first time at this convention. He described them and the "mechanisms" that they used for game play. 

    I listened with some fascination when he was describing a new solo game. I remember listening and saying to myself, "They make solo play board games?" I had never heard of such a thing. Needless to say, I was intrigued. One of the draws of computer games for me was that many could largely be played solo. Having grown up as an only child but also as a now adult middle aged man whose wife and kid are not particularly into gaming, finding friends to play games with me of any variety is a scheduling challenge. Most people my age are also married with kids and full time jobs and all that, and they simply don't have time or inclination for things like that.

    After listening to the podcast, I immediately got online and searched out this unicorn solo board game. In the process of that search, I found my way on to some board game seller websites. I was staggered at the sheer volume of games of all sorts and varieties that were available. There were literally thousands, and I had heard of absolutely none of them. The only board games I knew that existed were the moldy oldie ones they still sold at Walmart at Christmas time. 

     Immediately I ordered one online. If you are curious, it was called Siege of Valeria. It was basically a type of tower defense game. In retrospect, it is not that complex a game, but it is an excellent entry level solo player game. It does not take long to play or set up, and most importantly, it's a jolly fun little game. A bit of strategy but not difficult to learn or understand. The artwork on the cards was really top notch, which I appreciated as a former cartoonist.

     I will go more into subsequent games I have discovered over the last year or so in later blogs, but I just thought I would throw this out there about myself. If you are interested in the types and various complexities of games, I found an interesting video that explains the complexity levels of games and gives you some ideas of newer games you can try, if you are so inclined: