Dial J for Jordan: My History With Board Games

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)