I Love Gaming

I Do Love Gaming

Like many people, I play games. I use them to pass the time, occupy my brain, and socialize (sort of). At nearly 30 years old now, I am playing games just as much now as I did when I was a teenager. Some games I have left behind while others have been on and off over the years. Naturally, as new games come out, I have been picking them up to play around the table.

The two best things I have found out about games are socializing with good friends and that I have an outlet for my incessant need to always be getting better at something. The need to be better goes pretty well with any part of life it seems, but certain things get lonely. Many games are designed to be played with 2+ people and can be even more fun and exciting when your gaming partner/opponent, and by extension game play, changes.

What I Remember

I assume I started with all the same games that most kids played in the 90's. Some of what I did then I don't even personally consider a game now like that card activity called 'war'. I remember playing Chess against my dad and getting destroyed pretty much every time we played and playing Trouble with my brother and sister. Chutes and Ladders happened, though now that doesn't quite fit the bill of a game for me anymore either.

Naturally, the games I played became more complex, advanced, and some became digital as I got older. I sunk plenty of hours into my PlayStation game console and actually beat Sonic 3/Sonic & Knuckles on the Sega Genesis thanks to the first true save feature I can remember on a counsel.

The two games that have stuck with me the longest though I picked up around the turn of the century. Both have had a huge impact on my time and what I hope to get from my games.

The first is Magic the Gathering which I had gotten parts for but finally invested the time into figuring out how to make a decent and functional deck when I was a young teenager. I have still not gotten past how expensive some of the cards are, and that is reflected in my card collection now with the more expensive cards being older and some were not worth much when they came out. My collection has swelled with a larger expendable income which means that I now just have too many cards.

The second game is Warcraft III. I still haven't played the first two games in the series and I did play the huge MMO for quite a while, mostly throughout college. Real Time Strategy games always seemed perfect to me as players start with an equal opportunity with victory given to the superior skill and decision making player. This unfortunately breaks down some when the matches are no longer 1v1. My favorite aspect of the game is how you had to make choices quickly, but you had a few seconds to figure out what was happening instead of other games where the warnings really meant that you just lost everything you were not paying attention to.

These Days

I have either stopped playing or greatly reduced my consumption of a few game categories like party games and little children's games, though with a niece, a nephew, and a son of my own, I will likely have to get back into that second set. I have personally found the games to shallow in strategy or victory conditions are subject to personal preference.

I find that I am drawn to games with deeper rule sets and/or configuration variants. Table Top War Games have been very interesting to me lately and I have been getting a little deeper into Magic once again. I have also been dipping my toes into the game design side of gaming by making some custom game scenarios, building my own drafting cube, and working on alternative loot tables.

My wife and I tend to find a game and play for a week or two, I usually start to burn out on it (sorry sweetheart), and then we find something else to pass the time. On top of that, we try to have friends over weekly to play games and we have gotten a chance to play a few games I wouldn't have even thought to get like the Bob Ross painting game.

What I Aim To Do Here

Along with reviews and opinions on games, I will probably try to share some research notes from other parts of the gaming hobbies like miniatures painting research, alternative game scenarios, and maybe some house rules to use with different games. In the long run, I imagine these posts will be as much for me to remember as they are for anyone else to discover.

I will certainly wander though as I feel paint selection and terrain building is just as important as deck lists, new game experiences, sweet new computer hardware, and gaming server settings. I hope I can keep some things grouped together and that any of it makes sense.

Happy Gaming

-Zenfall