My History With Board Games - Part 2

Hello, hello!  Y'know, I feel like I spend a lot of time apologizing for not being around, but hey, sorry I haven't been around.  I was having some home-life issues this past weekend, but everybody's okay and it's all good now, for the most part.  All told I actually had a pretty great weekend, there was just a sizable amount of stressful stuff going on in the background.

But that's not why we're here today!  We're here to talk about tabletop gaming, specifically to continue my retrospective of how I've interacted with board games and card games, etc..  Last time we talked about my childhood and adolescence, with special focus on the trading card games of my youth.  Today we'll be talking about my adult life so far and how much I've gotten into the hobby since moving to Canada.

Actually, that's an important part of the story that's worth talking about for a second.  See, when I first moved to Canada to marry my wife, there was a long period of time where it was literally illegal for me to have a job.  My wife, of course, took care of me and still does, but we also had to live with her family, that being her parents and her three sisters (she has four but one lives in America).

What we had originally planned to be a relatively short amount of time turned into almost five years.  There was a lot of stress, and not a few fights.  I'm not always the easiest person to live with.  But none of that could ever outweigh how great it was of them to take me on and put up with me for such a long period of time.  They took me into their home and into their family and treated me like one of their own, and I'll always be grateful to them for that.

My wife and her sisters have a long history of doing things together, whether it be playing games (video or otherwise), going out, or just generally having fun.  Obviously, then, new multiplayer games were pretty much always a good thing.  As it happens, just a few months into my living with them, I learned about Arkham Horror.

Image borrowed from Yog-Sothoth.com

Arkham Horror, originally created in 1987, is heavily inspired and influenced by the works of H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu, et al).  It's a cooperative board game in which the players each take on the role of a character in the city of Arkham, Massachusetts, in the 1930s.  The players work together to fight off monsters, cultists, and all manner of maddening horror, with the ultimate goal being to stop the awakening of an extremely powerful Ancient One or, having failed that, hopefully destroy it.

After doing my usual amount of research into the game, at that point deep into its second edition, I ultimately decided it could be fun for my wife, her sisters, and I, and I bought it as soon as I tracked it down.  It's a somewhat complicated game to learn, and people's schedules are equally as complicated, so it took a couple weeks before any of us could really sit down and play it, but when we finally did, it was like a switch being flipped.

I'm not going to pretend to perfectly remember the first time we played, but I do know that we had a great time.  I was playing, of course, as was my wife Jessie, and my sisters-in-law Emily and Hannah.  Now, keep in mind that Arkham Horror is heavily, heavily influenced by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, which my wife and I had both known about and were interested in, but had never really tried to get into.  Hannah, at that time, was interested in just about anything, but Emily, as far as I know, had no interest in Lovecraft, and isn't much of a horror person, so I wasn't sure how she would respond to it.  Well, it's possible she loved it the most out of all of us, which is really saying something.

That became the normal group for a long while, the four of us playing Arkham Horror together when there was time, which wasn't extremely often since it's a pretty long game.  So many great stories came out of that time, but the one that sticks out to me the most was the time the character Jenny, whom Hannah was playing in that particular game, saved the world from evil by closing a portal to another dimension - with herself on the other side.  That was an emotional moment.

Requiescat en pace, Jenny Barnes.
Image borrowed from the Mansions of Madness wiki

It's amazing to think how much of an effect Arkham Horror had on my hobbies in the intervening years.  My wife and I are both now huge fans of the Lovecraftian horror mythos, and by relation other things inspired by it.  If I hadn't already loved Guillermo del Toro and Mike Mignola before, I certainly would now.  I'll talk in more detail about how I feel about this particular branch of the horror genre some other time, but I wanted to make sure it was known that, while I've always been interested, I may not  be anywhere near as into it without Arkham Horror.  And Bloodborne.

Beyond that, it's also the game that started my foray into tabletop games as a hobby and led directly into part 3 of this series, which I sincerely hope will be up tomorrow.  I'll finally get to talk about what has become my absolute favorite tabletop game, the final expansion of which I finally received recently.  I'm very, very excited, even though it might mean the end of all reality!

Before I go, I just want to reiterate that Arkham Horror is a fantastic board game.  I haven't played it since Emily moved out, and now Jessie and I have our own place as well, so things are even more complicated.  The game takes so long to set up and play, and we get together so rarely that it's difficult to put the time into it.  With all that considered, I'm really not sure if I'll ever play that edition of the game again.

But that's okay!  I'll always have my memories, and there are new things on the horizon!  See, a lot has happened in the tabletop gaming landscape in the years since Arkham Horror second edition was released. Fantasy Flight, the company that publishes the game, has also released another game called Eldritch Horror, similar to Arkham Horror in concept but more streamlined and with a more globe-trotting approach rather than a single town.  I've heard it's very good, but the global span of it seems a bit too big picture compared to Arkham's more intimate setting, so I've been hesitant to invest in it.

Closer to home has been the release of Arkham Horror: The Card Game, which again is a faster and more streamlined take on the original Arkham Horror.  It's still cooperative, but pared down to a maximum of two players (though two copies of the game can be merged to allow a maximum of four players).  Again, I've heard really good things about it, and I hope to be getting a copy of it soon enough.  I'm actually quite looking forward to it.

And now it's all come full circle, since before long we'll be seeing the release of Arkham Horror Third Edition.  It seems to bring back the characters and locations of the original (rather, the one I played), but with (again) faster and more streamlined play, and boasting a modular board that changes depending on the scenario being played.  That style of board is a great idea, but I feel like it loses a bit of its aesthetic appeal when compared to the town map of the second edition.  Still, I'm excited to see how things go with it.

With all that stuff going on, it seems even more likely that I won't play my second edition copy again, at least not more than once or twice.  It's a sad thought, but with all these new, faster ways to play, maybe we can finally get the old group back together and save the town of Arkham from evil together, just like the old days.

Until next time!

Current Interests:
Listening - No Joke! (Meat Puppets, 1995)
Playing - World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth
Reading - Island 731 (Jeremy Robinson, 2013)
Watching - Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return (2017)

The Tragedy of Magi-Nation

Hello hello!  I meant to have another post up last week, but time kind of got away from me.  I don't mean to make excuses, but I've got everything on a new schedule now and I'm still getting used to it, so I guess there will be some slip-ups here and there.

Now, I had originally planned for today's post to be a sequel to last week's post, detailing more of my recent history with tabletop games, but I decided to push that to later this week.

Instead, I decided to slide this article in today as a sort of interlude or segue from that last post to the next one.  I'm going to be talking about my favorite trading card game of all time: Magi-Nation Duel.

All images in this article courtesy of Blue Furok

There was a period of time in the early 2000s that I was absolutely enamored with Magi-Nation Duel.  It's the first property for which I can ever remember writing (or at least developing) my own fanfiction.  It's also, unfortunately, the first thing I can ever remember loving and losing.  Magi-Nation died way too soon and, unlike most things, I was still a fan when it went away.  But before I get into all of that, let me tell you a bit about it.

Sorry, Tony.

Magi-Nation Duel was a somewhat story-driven trading card game originally released in October of 2000.  The story involved a world known as the Moonlands, so named because the world was actually the moon of a larger planet.  The Moonlands are divided into a dozen or so regions, each one themed after a particular natural biome (swamplands, forests, mountains), some more fantastical than others.  The important characters residing here are known as Magi, people possessed with the ability to use magic, as well as summon and control monsters known as Dream Creatures.  For the life of me I can't remember if everyone is a Magi, or if that's just the only characters we see and there are mundane folks too, but I guess it's neither here nor there.  Oh, also sometimes people from Earth (that is to say, the real world?) find themselves pulled into the Moonlands and are then stuck there.  Woops.

Two players would go head-to-head, each playing a team of Magi and using a deck of cards built to (hopefully) maximize the strength of their selected Magi.  Players would take turns summoning Dream Creatures, casting spells, and just generally trying to take down their opponent.  As one Magi runs out of health, the controlling player removes them from the game and switches in their next Magi, and play continues until someone has lost all three of their Magi.  The player left standing is the winner.

Now, aside from some minor differences here and there, you might think that sounds a bit like Magic: the Gathering, the original, evergreen TCG that's still going strong to this day.  Well, that's because it was a lot like Magic, except for one very big detail: Magi-Nation was better.

Now before someone decides to burn something down due to that statement, first understand that I love Magic.  Admittedly, I don't really play it anymore, but that's mainly because I don't play TCGs (or any randomly-collected games) anymore.  I can be really bad about wanting to collect absolutely everything there is to collect when it comes to things I like, but I just can't afford that with a TCG.  Even if Magi-Nation still existed, I probably wouldn't be playing it anymore due to that fact alone.

So make no mistake, Magic has always been and continues to be a great game.  I was raised on it, and I can vividly remember when I was finally old enough to understand how to play.  I still own my old Magic cards, and I'll one day inherit my dad's collection.  Just last week I was ecstatic because I found my set of the five Basic decks from 2009.  I hadn't seen them since I moved a couple years ago, and I was worried they were lost.  And if there are decks to play, I will play.  I really like Magic.

So let it be understood that I do not proclaim anything to be "better" than Magic on a whim.  And I don't mean to imply that Magi-Nation was somehow perfect, since it clearly wasn't or it might still be around, and I think it's obvious that it never could have existed without Magic existing first.  But the simple fact of the matter is that Magi-Nation was, in my opinion, just a stronger game, mechanically speaking.

There are a few specific things that I could point to as things I like better about Magi-Nation, not the least of which being the Magi themselves.  See, each Magi was an actual character in the lore of the game, and each came with their own set of strengths and weaknesses.  Each Magi had their own specific amount of health/energy (we'll come back to that), as well as their own abilities and, best of all, a list of cards they start with in addition to their randomly-drawn hand.  Having an actual character (or set of characters) to represent you in the game, giving you special things you can do that the opponent can't, goes that extra step towards making you feel like you're actually playing a story rather than just laying cards down.  But maybe that's just me.

Speaking of the story, I didn't know all that much about it, ironically, mostly because I didn't keep up with (and later couldn't find) the original fiction the creators of the game would release on the official website.  But that didn't stop me from loving the setting, which I did and still do.  Like I said, this is the first franchise I can ever remember creating my own fanfiction for.  I had a favorite character, Gar, and since I didn't really know much about the actual story, Gar became the main character.  It was actually a really good writing exercise, since I would base the events of the story around what cards existed, and how later cards would change the feeling of certain things.  All of these things came to me more or less without context, and so I gave them context.  I can still remember a lot of the details to that story I came up with and never wrote down sixteen years ago so it just goes to show how important it was to me.

In fact, so fascinated was I with the whole setup of each region being themed around a particular element (also present in Bionicle, released the same year, which I'm sure I'll talk about at some point) that I still want to find a way to use it in a story or something nowadays.  I am unhappy with how rarely I see it.

Now, all of that is really just window dressing and flavor, and doesn't necessarily add up to a better game.  But that's okay, because now I come to my absolute favorite aspect of the game itself: the energy system.

For the benefit of the uninitiated, I'll just quickly explain about how you play cards in Magic.  See, the most important kind of card in Magic is what's known as Land.  There are five major types of Land cards, each connected to one of the five colors of mana in the game (blue islands, black swamps, etc.).  Land costs nothing to put into play (usually), and can then be used every turn as energy to cast spells or summon monsters.

So this is a fine system, and it's undoubtedly a classic, but I've always felt like it made the game just a bit too reliant on luck.  It seems like it happens far too often that an otherwise skilled player can be brought down by too little (or too much) land in hand.  There are ways around this, but they're iffy and still usually rely on luck.  To be fair, I haven't played with any new Magic cards in a very long time, so maybe this isn't such a problem anymore, but I highly doubt that.

My point is that Magi-Nation avoided the problem altogether by way of its energy system.  Each Magi begins the game with a certain amount of energy points.  This energy serves basically the same purpose as mana in Magic, but it also serves as the character's health pool.  To spend energy is to spend health, and to lose health is to lose energy.  It is absolutely possible that you could kill yourself by overspending your energy, but it's not quite as dangerous as you might think.  That's because every turn, during the "energize phase", your Magi regains a set amount of energy.

This system is, in my very humble opinion, so much more elegant and refined than the mana system in Magic that it's a little bit ridiculous.  Don't get me wrong, I'm fully aware that this is no longer unique, since there have been plenty of Magic-type games that have come up with various ways of avoiding the issues that come with mana.  One of the main ones I think of is Duel Masters, a game from a few years after Magi-Nation, which was set up so that any card could be used either for its intended effects (like summoning a monster) or as energy instead.  Hell, Hearthstone has a set amount of energy build up over the course of the game.  But keep in mind that Magi-Nation came out in 2000.  That's years before World of Warcraft came out, much less Hearthstone.

Again, I don't mean to belittle or insult any of these games, I only mean to bring across just how great this Magi-Nation was, and how much it deserved more time than it got.  After it petered out in 2002, there were a few attempts and there to bring it back, but these never got very far outside of a cartoon series a full five years later.  I've never seen the cartoon itself, but what I have seen of it leads me to believe that it failed to capture the spirit of the world.  But I'm not here to tear down things I haven't actually seen, so I don't have much to say about it.

I know that at least some of my feelings about this game are nostalgia, personal bias, or both.  But that doesn't change the fact that this property had real potential, which ultimately went untapped.  The fact that a website, the stalwart Blue Furok, still exists out there with a gallery of every card printed (and some not printed) goes at least a little way towards proving that I'm not the only one that loved it.

I've gone on record as saying that if I ever become one of those people with tons and tons of money, I will buy the rights to Magi-Nation and see to it that it gets re-released in some form or fashion.  I stand by that, but it's not the most likely thing in the world.  Hell, I'd be happy with a new Netflix animated series that more accurately captures the feeling of the world.  And I'd be ecstatic if, in some sort of dream scenario for me, Greater Than Games acquired the rights and started releasing the game again, with Adam Rebottaro doing the artwork.  And if you're unfamiliar with those names, hang around and you won't be for much longer.

Honestly though, I know that none of those things are likely, or even probable, and I've come to accept that.  Still, Magi-Nation is something that will always be with me, rattling around somewhere inside my brain.  I've still got my fanfiction in my head, I've got my own personal downloads of all the cards just in case Blue Furok ever goes down, and I even have ways to play the game now, albeit by proxy, so it's not all bad.

But if anyone out there is a millionaire and wants to #bringback Magi-Nation, just do me one favor: make Gar the main character.  He uses fire to heal people!

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - Lofi hip hop radio
Playing - Sentinels of the Multiverse (2011)
Reading - Island 731 (Jeremy Robinson, 2013)
Watching - Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return (2017)

My History With Board Games - Part 1

Greetings, intrepid readers!  I took off Labor Day week since my wife had a bunch of vacation time, and a few exciting things happened around here, but I'm back now and ready to talk.  So let's get talking!

So there's been a lot going on around here as of late, and a not-small percentage of the activity has been related to one of my favorite hobbies: board games.  And card games.  Really any tabletop gaming whatsoever.  I use the term "board game" as a catch-all in place of "tabletop games," just because I prefer how it sounds.  So, with all that in mind, and with not much else going on until October, September is going to be an unofficial "Board Game Month," of sorts.  That's right, it's so unofficial it gets written in title case.  Also, this "month" is starting ten days late, so...

I have a lot to say on the subject, and I'm hoping to get out at least two posts a week before the first Blogtober post on September 30th, so expect to be hearing a lot out of me.  I'll be talking about some of my favorite games, detailing the various ways I interact with the hobby, and just generally nerding out about it.  Today, though, to get us started, I'm going to be talking about my history with board games and how they've affected my life up to now.  So without further ado, away we go!

Okay, so as a kid, I loved board games.  I have very distinct memories of being roughly five years old and owning a Goosebumps Horrorland board game.  I don't remember anything about it (though I'm sure I'd recognize it), but I definitely remember that I had it.  I'm almost afraid to look it up out of fear that it doesn't exist.

Pictured: Proof of Existence
Image courtesy of the Goosebumps Wiki

I can also vividly remember my grandmother, who worked at Belk, asking me if I wanted her to buy me anything from there, and all I said was "A board game?", not realizing she meant clothing.  Because they sell clothing.  (Also, for the record, I originally typed Belk as Belk's because you can take the boy out of the South, et. cetera)

Now, back in those days, tabletop gaming wasn't quite the hobby it is today, especially for kids at that age.  We didn't have these newfangled complex mechanics and story-driven campaigns and gosh darn gorgeous art and extremely detailed miniatures.  I mean, those things existed, but I certainly didn't have access to them.

No, for me at that time, a board game was literally a board with some art on it (occasionally pretty good art, to be fair) and some player pieces.  In those days the classic gameplay mechanic was rolling a die to see how far you moved, then moving that many spaces and finding out what happened to you.  There would occasionally be some minor decision-making, but most of the games I played boiled down to a contest to see which player could roll higher numbers more often.  And yet I loved them.

Still, it wasn't really a hobby that I took into my teenage years.  By that time I had video games and anime and hormones, so there wasn't much room for board games, I guess?  Oh, I was also always alone, so that was a factor.  In fact, that was a factor that made me invest in the Castle Ravenloft board game somewhere in my late teens, because it could be played solo!  Too bad the apartment we lived in at the time didn't really have any room to set it up.  Woops.

On the other hand, I also lived through the boom of trading card games.  Seriously, I have owned, or at least played, probably more than fifty unique TCGs in my days.  It started with Magic: The Gathering, of course, but if you can name it there's a good chance I played it, either then or since.  I loved the Pokemon TCG when it was new, to the point that it's still the only tabletop game I've ever played against strangers competitively.  I didn't do well.

I had tons of Digimon cards, tons of Dragonball Z cards, I tried the X-Men card game (once) and I don't even like X-Men!  Rage, Vampire, NetRunner, Star Wars CCG, several other Star Wars games that were nowhere near as good as the CCG, Wizard in Training (totally not a Harry Potter ripoff), the actual Harry Potter card game, MLB Showdown (for some reason), Magi-Nation Duel (oh, we'll be coming back to this one), Yu-Gi-Oh!, Duel Masters, the original World of Warcraft card game, Calorie Kids!

I want it to be understood that that last one isn't a joke.  As a kid, I saw the artwork of Calorie Kids on some TCG website or another, announcing it as a new game.  It might have been the first thing I ever pre-ordered.  It turned out to be so bad and so short-lived that it doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.  In fact, the only real substantial bit of evidence I could find that it ever even existed is the website of one of the game's artists, linked here.

Lead is a valuable source of iron, and I am
a valuable source of lame jokes.

Looking at it now, it's definitely the game I remember, but I can't for the life of me tell you why I was so excited about it.  I guess as a kid I just liked anything vaguely action cartoon-like?  I know I liked the blue guy with the knife in the group picture on that website, whose name I am almost certain was Bluberi or something along those lines.  It's obvious to (somewhat more) adult eyes that the game was apparently trying to be educational?  About nutrition?  I mean, I guess that was the intent, but I really don't see how they planned for it to accomplish that goal, unless proper nutrition somehow involves guns.  Although, as an American that's not all that outlandish.

Also, it basically played like War.  Y'know, the card game you play when you're tired of Old Maid and Go Fish and you literally don't know any other card games?  Just imagine that but with slightly fancier (or at least more colorful) artwork.  It's clear that the creators of Calorie Kids, Ocean of Wisdom (who also don't have a Wikipedia page), like many edutainment companies before them, took the most cynical outlook possible: kids will buy anything with brightly-colored characters, and anything is educational if it has vaguely educational-sounding themes.  And yes, it worked on a previous form of me, but I played it once and never bought more cards.  That is literally the opposite of a sustainable business model.

Still, it wasn't all bad.  I think people tend to look back on that period of time as an endless sea of pointless cash-ins and garbage games, and yes that was a real problem.  But there were, at the very least, a small handful of very good games, many of them, in my opinion, better than Magic.

The original Star Wars CCG was, to my eyes, the greatest licensed tabletop game of its era, and is still played in unofficial tournaments to this day.  NetRunner may very well be the finest game Richard Garfield (the original creator of Magic, by the way) ever created, and was remade a few years ago by Fantasy Flight as Android: NetRunner, a great game in its own right.  Pokemon is still being published, and I never played the Legend of the Five Rings card game but it was, for a very long time, the second-oldest TCG to still be published, only finally ceasing publication twenty years after its inception.  Oh, and it's also been remade by Fantasy Flight, so it's technically still going, albeit no longer collectible.  And Magi-Nation.  Oh, the tragedy of Magi-Nation.

It's this small handful of games that deserve to be remembered.  To use a wrestling reference, they are the Eddie Guerreros, the CM Punks, the Daniel Bryans of their industry.  They will never be as mainstream or as marketable as the John Cenas and the Roman Reignses (here represented by Magic), but they are just as deserving of our appreciation, and in many ways, they're even better.

But not Calorie Kids.  Calorie Kids is the Gobbledy Gooker.

Tune in next time, when we'll go into detail about my more recent fascination with tabletop gaming as a hobby, and maybe even find out what my favorite tabletop game is.  Exciting!

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - Lofi hip hop radio
Playing - Resident Evil 4 (PS4, 2016)
Reading - Paperbacks From Hell (Grady Hendrix, 2017)
Watching - Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return (2017)

Pictured: Calorie Kids