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Introduction – 2012 / 2013
(or as I like to call it)
Memoirs of A Recovering
(OK – I’m not even trying) Board Game Addict…

This one requires some explanation and history…

I realized at a very young age that I loved games…unfortunately, I didn’t discover the MODERN board game hobby until a rather (comparatively) old age…

Let’s start with a brief History lesson… a stroll down my (fading) Memory Lane… 🙂

In the mid-60’s the Pop-O-Matic games were all the rage and I was lucky enough to have both Trouble and Headache during my childhood…

Dad also worked in a small indoor theatre during the winters (these were rare in the area I grew up in in the mid / late 60’s) and Mom’s nights were free… I would go with him some nights and there was a Stewart’s just down the street… it was a big deal to me to be able to walk down there by myself at 7 or 8 years old and get ice cream… different times back then… 🙂

Some nights we’d all pile in the car (Mom, Dad, me and my brother), drop Dad off at the theater in Warrensburg, then continue north to visit my Grandmother in Chestertown… I was only 7 or 8 when she taught me how to play card games like Crazy 8’s, Rummy and Solitaire… then we’d pick my Dad up on the way back through… I should mention the game Scrabble… even though I was too young to play with them, my Mom and Gram were BOTH brutal players and would sometimes venture into a ‘Dirty Word’ variant on a Sunday afternoon… 🙂

I credit things like this with keeping my Grandmother sharp right up until she passed… my Mom turns 92 in 2024… she played a lot of word games on her PC (that she never thought she’d use) and still plays a lot of word games on her iPad (that she also never thought she’d use) as well as keeping up on email with friends all over the country… I truly believe that these things are keeping her sharp as a tack for which I’m very grateful… 🙂

When I was 9 or 10, my Dad was able to leave the seasonal work of the drive-ins and the tiny indoor theater and landed a full-time year-round job at a brand new indoor complex with TWIN 500+ seat theaters!! It was amazing to me at the time… huge chandeliers, bright gold foil wallpaper with black felt designs in it… how does this tie in with my gaming?? Well every so often Bob and I would go with him, watch one of the movies then spend the rest of the night on the floor of the ‘booth’ (Remember? The room with all the movie projectors) playing ‘Paper Football‘!! A simple game we’d learned in school where you fold and tape a sheet of paper into the shape of a triangle then slide it back and forth until it only partially crosses the ‘goal’ line (which in this case was the seams of opposite ends of one of the sections of the painted plywood floor)… for an extra point or field goal attempt, the other guy would place his hands on the ground like he was pointing two finger guns barrel-to-barrel but with his thumbs up to simulate the uprights of the goal posts, then the player with the ‘ball’ would stand it on its’ point and try to FLICK it between the uprights… we would play for hours and all it required was paper, tape and something rectangular to be the field… other nights I’d go to his house and Dad would pick me up on his way home…

When I was a little older – old enough that they felt I could stay home alone – I was allowed to have a couple of the neighborhood kids over and we’d break out some old standards like Parcheesi or Pay Day or Landslide or Life or Monopoly, etc… and Monopoly became a Christmas Eve tradition with my brother, Mom and Gram…

When I was in 7th or 8th grade there were a couple of older kids that lived next door to us and I’d go visit them occasionally… the oldest one (a senior) taught me to play Stratego and Yahtzee… of course he also used me as a Guinea Pig one morning while I was waiting for the school bus… he was preparing for senior skip day when he had me taste test some ‘orange juice’… when I told him it tasted like orange juice he said there must not be enough Vodka in it… then I knew he was making Screwdrivers and I was so naive that I had just drank some before school… I felt no ill effects from it and remember it as a normal day, but it was the only time in my life that I’ve had alcohol… 🙂

Shortly after graduating high school in 1978 I had a couple life-changing moments as I landed my first band and bought my first computer – a small Timex Sinclair 1000 which eventually lead to a Commodore 64 which I discovered could do so much more than games thanks to Berkley GeoWorks (at right)…

While I was fascinated by the productivity applications, I was definitely loving the C-64 for the mind blowing (for the time) video games… BOTH things would have a huge impact on my life in general and continue to do so to this day as you’ve no doubt discovered if you’ve visited any of my other pages on this site…

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Let’s jump ahead about 44 years to the year 2012…

While my wife (Julie) and our daughter (Selena) and I enjoy doing a lot of things together we also have decidedly different tastes in things like TV and movies and such… for example, we all enjoy the old (I’m talking black and white) Andy Griffith and Dick Van Dyke Shows… Selena likes them both so much that over the years Julie and I have given her both series on DVD!! And while we all enjoy Star Wars movies I can’t get them to watch any Star Trek – original TV series or movies – old or new…

When Selena was younger we played the usual games – Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, Mouse Trap, etc… As she grew up, we moved into Parcheesi, of course the Hannah Montana version of Mall Madness, Yahtzee, the aforementioned Disney Scene It series and eventually into Life and Julie’s then favorite brings us back to Monopoly. And I, personally, was never more excited than when Selena asked me to teach her how to play Chess (being a former avid albeit average player and local club member). Selena and I still break (bad choice of words) out the beautiful glass set Julie got me several years ago for a game when Julie’s health takes her ‘out of the game’ (so to speak).

But as much as I loved game night with my girls I was losing interest in the ‘usual suspects’… Sorry and Uno and their various off-shoots (Sorry Sliders, Sorry Spin, Uno Attack, etc.) were OK but we were all getting more into electronics… Wii and later Xbox, iPad, Nook, smartphones, computers, etc…

Monopoly and Life were still the old standbys and in 2012 the board game industry must have recognized the shift to electronics and released what they called ‘Zapped’ versions – Monopoly Zapped and Life Zapped – that still had what amounted to the standard board BUT incorporated an iPad and app into the game!! I thought this would be just the thing to make these games interesting again – at least to me… and they did!! For a while anyway…

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Julie’s brother Adam gave Selena a new family matching game from Mattel called Apples to Apples which we still enjoy… and this game is ‘Mom Approved’!! That means that my Mom likes it too… I’ll try to remember to note this on other games as well for those of us with older parents…

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And another (what I would later learn are referred to as a ‘dexterity’ games) called Wobble… we just knew it was fun!!

It was the first time we’d seen or tried anything like it… the bottom of the game board was ROUND – a little smaller than half a bowling ball – and the game board balanced on that!!

From Board Game Geek (THE website for everything board game): Try to roll a ping pong ball in the right hole by balancing the game board. On your turn you roll the dice and get as many action points as you rolled. With an action point you can drop a disc on the edge of the playing board to attempt to make the board tilt in the direction of the desired color hole. You can also remove a disc from the board but only by using what resembles a chopstick – no fingers allowed.

First one to successfully roll the ball in the holes of their selected color order is the winner.

We enjoyed all of these – and some of the old classics – and still pull them out occasionally but it still wasn’t enough… I was getting bored (I think the girls were too) and I wanted something more…

Then it happened…

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It was 2013 and only a few months before Christmas… I was Googling around the Internet for gift ideas and must have searched for something like ‘family board games’ when I stumbled on the Board Game Family website. This was pretty much your typical family with Dad, Mom and three kids of varying ages who all enjoyed playing board games together and shoot what amounted to home movie type reviews of the games they’re playing. There were a ton of games and I had never heard of a single one of them!! I must have spent days going through their site – my eyes widely opened to this whole new world that was out there and I had no idea!! I was growing increasingly excited…

There were even more games out there… strategy, heavy, light, long, short… I soon learned what was meant by a ‘Euro game’… I have GOT to try some of these!!!

My concern though was would the girls like them??

Over the next several weeks The Board Game Family and Tabletop became invaluable tools… Tabletop produced season 4 in 2017 which was sadly the last but all 4 seasons are on YouTube, are very well done and still very entertaining!!

After much research I decided to go out on a limb that Christmas and began compiling a shopping list. I soon learned however that these aren’t your typical department store / mainstream type games though I later discovered that Toys R Us and Walmart carry a few but Target of all places has the best in-store selection of what I would call ‘non-traditional’ or ‘modern’ games… some of which I later learned are even released exclusively to them before going to traditional retail channels!! And some Barnes & Noble stores have a decent selection as well!! But Amazon became my new best friend, so I did some online shopping…

Please note that from this point forward I will try (to remember) to include the descriptions from Board Game Geek ‘(from BGG)’ – THE place to look online for board game information… or the game publisher and links to various videos of reviews or playthroughs that helped make my decisions in hopes that they will help you to get an idea of whether or not you or your family might enjoy a game (as they helped me) before actually buying it.

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Over the past couple of years I’ve discovered several other review sources on YouTube that I enjoy… The Dice Tower – I love Tom Vasel, Zee Garcia and Sam Healey’s top 10 lists and their individual reviews are very good… AND Tom Vasel just (August 2017) put out a series videos with alternatives to the old favorites like 10 Games Better Than Monopoly and 10 Games Better Than Life (there are many more on the Dice Tower channel of YouTube covering Uno, Scrabble, Clue and more). Then there’s The GameBoyGeek – very quick and positive reviews and he has Rules School for many games so you don’t need to read the manuals (though I still do) and Man vs. Meeple (very polished reviews). More recently I’m also enjoying Rodney Smith’s Watch It Played series – very handy for learning new games… I’ve come to really enjoy Rahdo’s run throughs and reviews… sometimes helpful, sometimes confusing and sometimes he just messes up the rules… but he is enthusiastic!!

While I’ll try include links for some of the titles that follow, I should mention that there are a number of other sources on YouTube alone for game reviews and previews… Jon Gets Games, Board Game Brawl, Drive-Thru Review, Starlit Citadel (no longer making videos but have 4 seasons of reviews), Undead Viking, Dog & Thimble, BoardGameGeekTV, Board to Death Reviews, Shut Up & Sit Down just to name a few. Some will disagree with others and I eventually learned that my tastes may not necessarily align with one reviewer or another but more importantly, I learned that it’s OK that I like something that a particular reviewer may not. Now where was I… oh yeah – Christmas shopping!!

I’ll never forget that Christmas morning… I couldn’t wait to show my girls what I had discovered but was ever so anxious about their reactions… They couldn’t imagine what was wrapped in those boxes or why I was making them wait but I knew which was which and the order I wanted them opened (because I’m a little OCD… or ADD… maybe AC/DC)…

 

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First up was Sequence – a board and card game with elements of Bingo where the object of the game is to form rows of 5 chips on the board by placing them on spaces corresponding to standard playing cards played from your hand. That looked like fun…

(From Board Game Geek from here on I’ll just say ‘From BGG’) Sequence is a board and card game. The board shows all the cards (except for the Jacks) of two (2) standard 52-card decks, laid in a 10 x 10 pattern. The four corners are free spaces and count for all players equally.

The players compete to create rows, columns or diagonals of 5 connected checkers placed on the cards that the player has laid down. Two-eyed Jacks are wild, while one-eyed Jacks allow an opponent’s checker to be removed. The game ends when someone has reached a specified number of connections.

Why (we wanted it / like it (or don’t): It’s a very easy game to play and teach and plays pretty quick. Even my Mom enjoys it but that may be because of the Bingo element… 🙂

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Next up was Ligretto Dice… I explained that it was quick, fun, and just a little chaotic since everyone plays at once – trying to get their dice on the game board before everyone else. They liked that idea…

(From BGG) The game transfers Ligretto’s idea of simultaneous play to a simple dice game.

At the beginning of each round, the players draw an equal number of dice from the cloth bag depending on the number of players.

Then they roll their dice simultaneously and try to place their dice on the placement board as fast as possible. Of course, dice may only be placed in the column of the corresponding color and they have to be placed in ascending order (e.g. the 3 may only be placed when the 1 and 2 are already in place). At any time, a player may reroll ALL his unplaced dice.

As soon as one player gets rid of all his dice, play stops. For each of his unplaced dice, each player gets minus one point. In addition, the player who finished first positively scores the sum of all unplaced dice. The game is played in several rounds.

Why (we wanted it / like it (or don’t): The simultaneous play is what attracted me to this in the first place… all my girls – 3 generations including Mom – enjoy this though we all have a difficult time beating Selena… her brain must work that much faster than the rest of us… I know her hands do.

UPDATE: It’s a couple months before Christmas 2017 and my friend and coworker Bill invites me to his house for a game night as he has one of the older daycare kids staying late… I brought a couple games that I thought she’d be able to play and this was one of them… we played it a couple times, played the others but had to go back to it once more before she left… she told her family it was the only thing she wanted for Christmas and they found it for her!! I’ve only recently (2019) realized how much I’m thrilled to introduce new players to the hobby but I didn’t anticipate one so young (maybe 8 or 9) taking to it like she did…

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Then came my biggest gamble of all… Carcassonne!! The look on their faces as they unwrapped it was priceless… a total mix of confusion and curiosity!! ‘It’s a board game without a board – you create it as you play so it’s different each time you play’ I proudly proclaimed as this was what had attracted me to it in the first place… stares and the sound of crickets in my head… this one might be a hard sell… uh-oh…

(From BGG) Carcassonne is a tile-placement game in which the players draw and place a tile with a piece of southern French landscape on it. The tile might feature a city, a road, a cloister, grassland or some combination thereof, and it must be placed adjacent to tiles that have already been played, in such a way that cities are connected to cities, roads to roads, etc. Having placed a tile, the player can then decide to place one of his meeples (at right – a tiny, usually wooden character matching your chosen color that represents you in the game) on one of the areas on it: on the city as a knight, on the road as a robber, on a cloister as a monk, or on the grass as a farmer. When that area is complete, that meeple scores points for its owner and is returned to them (except farmers that aren’t scored until the end of the game).

During a game of Carcassonne, players are faced with decisions like: “Is it really worth putting my last meeple there?” or “Should I use this tile to expand my city, or should I place it near my opponent instead, giving him a hard time to complete his project and score points?” Since players place only one tile and have the option to place one meeple on it, turns proceed quickly even if it is a game full of options and possibilities.

Over the next several days we played Sequence and Selena totally kicks everyone’s butt at Ligretto Dice… and in my spare time I was reading and re-reading the rules for Carcassonne… the scoring was a little complicated at first glance but the game play was pretty straightforward and I wanted to be ready for any questions they might have. Eventually I convinced them to try it…

The first play started slow… our version included the River expansion that Wil plays with in the Tabletop video and, just like he said, we soon got the hang of it. Once we’d exhausted the tiles – which triggers the end of the game – we set about figuring out and completing the scoring. This is another element of the game that I really enjoy (that I believe is fairly common in ‘Euro’ style games from the various information I’m absorbing) and that is that you won’t necessarily know who won for sure until the very end and everyone is usually pretty close. This was the case here with Selena narrowly edging out Julie and myself. I looked at them and (bravely) asked, “What do you think?”  They immediately wanted to play again and to this day I’m proud (and relieved) to say that it is one of my wife’s favorite games!!  Selena likes it too and I should mention that she won the first games of Sequence and Ligretto Dice as well as Carcassone and thus began a streak of her winning the first time we played any new game!! A streak that lasted for 5 years – until Christmas 2017!!

Why (we wanted it / like it (or don’t): A board game without a board – how can that be?!? I had to find out!! This is very different from anything any of us have ever played and once we got the hang of the scoring it was easier to plan strategically and introduce to non-gamers. It’s different every time you play because you’re essentially creating the board as you play… incredible!!

And so it began – my (and my family’s) introduction to ‘modern board gaming’ and my subsequent addiction – a new hobby for me at age 52!!

What else was out there?? All I knew was that I now had the girls hooked too and couldn’t wait for the next chapter.

My confidence now high, I sought to add to our blossoming collection and used any excuse I could…

In 2014 my education would continue… click here to continue…