Specific Games

I grew up playing games at home. Not in any particularly intense way but games were definitely part of family life. My father is also a big baseball fan and I grew up watching games on TV, going to games in person in Chicago and then elsewhere, playing catch with dad and my brother, and playing baseball in t-ball and little league. In 5th and 6th grade I had a friend named George Kunin. We did a lot of stuff but we spent a lot of time playing games. Stratego, Clue, Scotland Yard, King Maker, Twixt, Shogun, and a little bit of go were the main ones. We also collected baseball cards together. I used to enjoy going to hobby shops and I got interested in hex and counter war games during my time in Oak Park (5th through 7th grade) but didn't really have anyone who was interested in playing. During that time I got introduced to roleplaying games but didn't have much opportunity to play. I tried to start a board game club in 7th grade but only had one meeting although it was a good one with 5 or 6 friends.

Over the years I continued to investigated both go and chess and have played at various clubs and in tournaments as well as online. I also have had an interest in video games starting with the Atari my dad bought and the original NES my brother got. But all of these have waxed and waned. In college I actually bought a new desktop computer so I could play Civ 4 when it came out. After college my ex-wife and I decided to move to Taiwan. While there I kind of cast around for something to occupy my mind and gradually settled on chess. I got very obsessive about chess in a lot of ways and went to a club and played tournaments and took lessons and read books etc.

At times I would switch to go and visit go clubs around Taipei and seek people online to play with in person. But for the most part chess dominated. At some point though I started to lose enthusiasm for chess because I seemed to have hit a plateau fairly early on and for whatever reason hadn't made much progress beyond that.

I have also over the years had spurts of being interested in Euro type boardgames and have owned some and played with friends and family as well as playing on Board Game Arena and Yucata. I also got fairly obsessive about PC video games for awhile and built my own gaming PC and bought a lot of games.

Around the fall of 2021 I got interested in Magic the Gathering. I of course knew about the game before then but had always been put off by the fact that it seemed like it would be very expensive to play. For awhile that was my new obsession and I have been to a lot of actual in person events like pre-releases and drafts as well as playing commander (mostly at home with my boys but also at the game shop with others). But like all the other games it comes and goes. Somewhere in the course of these developments I also got interested in the concept of ludology and philosophy of games and developing a religion of games.

The Big Three

As I mentioned above, the big three that I have been interested in over the course of my life are chess, go, and magic. Obviously Magic is a newcomer to my life but I have spent more time playing it since I jumped in than many of the other "also ran" games. I think I like that they are physical games (boards, pieces, stones, cards) as opposed to video games although all three of those games can be played online and many people primarily play them that way. I also like that they all have a history and culture to them. Obviously again, Magic is the newcomer but even in its relatively short time on the scene it has developed a very interesting history and culture that can easily be studied online. I also like that it is pretty easy to find organized in-person play for all three of these and I have participated in that kind of thing for all of them. I also like that all of these games have creativity and it is possible to develop a personal style. I also like that all three of them have both strategic and tactical elements.

The most recent project list for specific games is at this page.