tried and erred

I have always loved board games. 

I've forgotten large chunks of my childhood but I clearly remember playing bad TV franchise games (and a hundred other games), all with my sister.

I played Heroquest (and our homemade variants) tirelessly with my best friend. 

And I remember Payday with my grandmother on rainy days. 

I remember trying and failing to teach wargames to my mother.

I remember my dad teaching us card games.

I remember Uno with PopPop. Epic games of Trivial Pursuit late into the night were a huge part of every Florida vacation.

I hardly remember my parents' friends from my youth but I remember the guy who taught me Can't Stop the night our family went to his house. 

I remember solitaire restaurant games and Pass the Pigs. 

I remember countless games of Stratego.

I remember chess clubs and study halls consumed by chess. 

I remember reading so many RPG guides and never actually getting around to any role-playing. 

I remember the awestruck feeling of looking through my first starter deck of Magic: The Gathering in 1993 and the early days of figuring it out with friends.

I remember Groo: The Card Game and Fuzzy Heroes with a basement full of toys. 

I remember games of "Mafia" in college better than I remember most of my classes.

I remember the night in 2002 that a good friend introduced me to Settlers of Catan and re-awakened me to good games.

My obsession peaked in 2006 when I joined a local group in Buffalo. I was introduced to new Euro games every week.

I started attending longer weekend events.

In 2008, I was invited to and attended The Gathering of Friends. I had achieved board game royalty status.

Since then, it's been largely a story of gaming in decline.

I found a good local group in Binghamton, hosted by a gracious friend at his house, but that group fizzled out and that friend mostly plays RPGs now. I created a couple of characters but could never get myself motivated enough to show up to any sessions.

To be honest, though, my tastes were always different than the dominant "Ameritrash" tastes of the house and it was often a struggle to get something I truly wanted to play to the table. At least there were always two-player abstracts to play with Ben.

There's a great game store in Vestal with game nights, but I didn't feel welcome the few nights I went when the store was first opened (a few years ago now) and I often got stuck playing crappy games. I've heard that things have changed, but I haven't been there in a long while.

Then, CR5FC was on the scene and slowly became my replacement hobby. I love movies and it was always easy to love Brandon and love movies together. I can't imagine a universe in which the two of us met each other and didn't instantly form a two-man film club.

CR5FC has always been a joy. Even so, it's never given me that feeling of focus and peace that concentrating on a game has done. I hesitate to say it, but I think that, for me, tabletop games are a more fulfilling art form than cinema.

(Brandon's head just exploded)

Watching a movie is not (or at least ought not be) a passive endeavor, but there is undeniably a more passive element to it. Games are more like plays in this regard than films are. The ruleset and components are the script and stage. Reading the rules and examining bits is like reading a play. Watching someone else play the game is like watching a play. Depending on the game and on the players, this can be very satisfying. Playing the game, though, is like acting in the play. There is a quality inherent in the game itself, like a printed script, but it really becomes alive when the right players "perform" the game. I'm not very good at "acting." I am quite good at "playing." 

It's a shame that gamers are often given a negative stereotype as socially awkward and maladjusted. In my experience, this is the furthest thing from the truth. Board games are always collaborative even when they are at their most competitive. Accordingly, the people playing them, no matter what personal quirks they have, are most often warm and gracious and ready to include others. And those "quirks" often don't seem all that quirky now that the geeks have won and everyone pays attention to Comic-Con and watches The Big Bang Theory. (I could get into a rant here about how pop sci-fi has won out at the expense of intelligent literary sf but that's a rabbit trail and probably no one is reading this post, so what's the use?)

It's worth noting that the current state of games and gaming owes its existence to the Industrial Revolution at least as much as film does. In the past, the only games that got played and passed on were ones that could be easily hand made and had minimal pieces. So, chess and checkers and go and eventually all of the various card games. With cheap mass production, the modern game became possible and a previously unavailable wealth of creative possibilities exploded into the world. What was possible in these new games was slowly worked out throughout the 20th century and especially in the past 30-40 years (and really ramped up in the last 20). We are now currently living in a "Golden Age" of gaming. Sturgeon's Law still applies, but that's as true of films and everything else as it is of gaming.

Also worth explaining to non-gamers is that games are the products of auteurs. Games have the personalities of their designers. I'm a big fan of Wolfgang Kramer and Martin Wallace. I'm not a fan of others.

And big game companies today tend to have a "house style" similar to the way that movie studios did in the 30s-50s, with an accompanying stable of talent.

As a side note, I think that there is (maybe a lot of) overlap between board and video games, but it is a huge mistake to treat the two as identical.

I want to start playing more games again.

So, I don't know. I guess this is just a moment of looking back and an attempt to re-orient my board game interests. And also an excuse to make lists.

So, here are some lists...

Since 2006, I've logged 1,043 plays of 353 unique games! Below are my favorites from the years 1999-2008. Some years, I could have listed 10-15 games. One year, there were only three games that I thought were worthy. I settled on a Top Five as a decent compromise number that would work for every year. I chose the years '99 through '08 because I thought that these years best represented the new boom of the Euro game. Recent years have seen the dominance of deck-builders and the resurgence of big thematic games.

I've played most of the big Euro titles from these years. I like playing Euros but my lists also reflect my preference for "weuros" and abstracts and block wargames. The following is not my attempt at listing the "best" or "most important." They're just personal favorites.

Top 5 Board Games 1999-2008

1999 

1) Tikal

2) Lost Cities

3) Zertz

4) Mordred

5) Elk Fest

2000

1) Bladder

2) Java

3) Way Out West

4) Carcassonne

5) Wizard Kings

2001

1) Hive

2) Dvonn

3) TransAmerica

(2001 is a really weak year. I do own Wilderness War and Wyatt Earp but I haven't played either one. I think they'd make it on this list)

2002

1) Hammer of the Scots

2) Age of Steam

3) Mexica

4) Trias

5) Bang!

2003

1) Lord of the Rings (children's Knizia adventure game)

2) Hey! That's My Fish!

3) Yinsh

4) Battleball

5) 10 Days in Europe

2004

1) Heroscape

2) The Downfall of Pompeii

3) Friedrich

4) Fire & Axe: A Viking Saga

5) Sunken City

2005

1) Twilight Struggle

2) Antike

3) Target Arnhem: Across Six Bridges

4) Siam

5) Descent: Journeys in the Dark

2006

1) Bananagrams

2) Terra Nova

3) Storm Over Stalingrad

4) Combat Commander: Europe

5) Commands and Colors: Ancients

2007

1) Agricola

2) Age of Empires III

3) 1960: The Making of the President

4) Zooloretto

5) Tzaar

2008

1) Unhappy King Charles!

2) Conflict of Heroes: Awakening the Bear!

3) 2 de Mayo

4) Cornerstone

5) Tinner's Trail

Top 20 Essential Games (Excluding Chess and Go)

Bladder

Hammer of the Scots

Tikal

Tigris & Euphrates

Magic: The Gathering

(These Top 5 are truly my favorite games.)

-The rest are roughly in order of preference but could be swapped around and there are at least a dozen other games that could get swapped in-

Twilight Struggle

Agricola

Java

Mexica

Way Out West

Age of Steam

Bananagrams

Barbarian Prince

Terra Nova

Trias

The Downfall of Pompeii

Unhappy King Charles!

Bang!

Hive

Lost Cities

That's it. The next post here should be a response to Brandon and some rambling about the movies I've watched recently.