Magic: the Gathering really captured my heart from a young age. There’s something really compelling about building a deck and doing fights with it.

I kinda drifted away from it, though. It’s an expensive hobby, and the “C” part of CCG never really appealed to me: I derive little joy from collecting.

Learn From My Mistakes

So, uh, perhaps you are familiar with Arkham Horror? Maybe a decade ago I brought you to my home to attempt to play it as a group?

Hey, did you see this thing? “The Game Prototype That Had to Be Banned by Its Own Studio”.

My copy of Oath arrived!

And, yeah, post-pandemic I’ve been able to rebuild a small group of board gamers who are willing to engage with me, even on ridiculous games like Oath. So let me tell you some of my thoughts about it.

one thing that IRL board games have that digital board games can never have is that after six or seven plays with friends, you unlock a new mode where you’re just allowed to change game rules if you think it’ll make the game more fun

apparently r/boardgames doesn’t appreciate my creativity

r/boardgames is losing it because a 50% tariff from China and a global recession is going to kill kill the current modern board games industry, but IMO what’s dying is “overproduced board games”, if you’ve got a laser printer, a few decks of playing cards, some dice, index cards, markers, scissors, the world is your oyster

this is one of my favourite recent SNL sketches

it’s just a whole table of people getting bogged down in a needlessly heated argument about what exactly “being jumanjied” entails

Jumanji is a series of jungle emergencies

i have a commander deck that’s just 100 islands and Unesh, Criosphinx Sovereign that I only bring out so that I can dramatically say “I PLAY…. AN ISLAND” in my most overwrought Yu Gu Oh voice every turn

anyways I’m not allowed to MTG events anymore

new gaming tables run multiple thousands of dollars and tend towards a design with hang-on-cupholders where a large rectangular board is really deeply recessed, which is really only practical or necessary if you have games that you intend to run for multiple sessions and also have super-long monkey arms

but what I think you actually want for most games smaller than Twilight Imperium is a small lip, felt, and easy access to the center of the table

y’know, a poker table

because these were common decades ago, it’s a lot easier to find one of these on the cheap

they’re nice, too

(of course it’s a moot point, my house is too tiny to support dedicated gaming tablery)

This picture was taken by request, as the folks responsible wanted to gloat

I don’t like it when board games have legacy mechanics. That ’s too big of an ask of my time and friend group, and a lot of times they result in permanent damage to the game’s innards as you tear up boxes and bits and bobs.

I’ve bought a few and I’ve regretted each one.

The draft layouts for the combat system in a game I’m fussing with are starting to reveal a problem with it. Reasonably a player could expect to have, like, six pages like this: JUST DENSE TEXT.

I like to write, and draw, and code, and design games - and I’m not amazing at any of these skills - and it feels like the output of these skills are largely things that there are simply too many of already.

there are enough novels, and books, and comics, and board games, and video games, and TTRPGs, I’m not sure if there really needs to be more of those things

there is simply enough art, what could I possibly add?

In “Race to El Dorado” the powerful Scientist card allows you to make your deck (of explorers) more efficient by removing (less powerful ones) them from your deck, so when we played we’d describe all of the fanciful ways that the Scientist would accidentally or intentionally kill his fellow adventurers.

“Bosewick! I need you to investigate those vines over there. Oh my, Bosewick, you’ve been consumed! Fascinating.”

Near the end of the game it had happened a lot, so every time someone’s Scientist cleared a card out of their deck the whole table would go “HUP!”, which was the sound of the now increasingly buff and unhinged Scientist just picking up one of his compatriots under the armpits like a baby and tossing them into the nearest ravine. HUP!

we have a house rule for Oath where we replace all of the tokens with “fried chicken” tokens that are made out of real fried chicken, and also we replace all of the cards with hot sauce and coleslaw and fries, and…

it’s becoming increasingly clear that my friends have just fooled me into buying them dinner again, dang

One of my most actually unpopular opinions is that I think Twilight Struggle, Board Game Geek’s #1 game for like 10 years in a row, is not as fun as that #1 position makes it seem.

Look at this bullshit:

you want to experience Twilight Struggle, but fun? there’s a game for that, it’s called Watergate

I swear to god, 100% of Watergate’s design appears to be “let’s make Twilight Struggle, but good”.

no commentary, here, except to say that getting Eclipse to the table is so difficult that this picture represents a real personal accomplishment, even if it was my younger brother who did all of the work of organizing this.