What I Played Then and Now
There is a subset of board games that are often referred to as "gateway games." The notion behind such a designation is these are games that get folks into the board gaming hobby; playing such games facilitates an entry into a "larger world" of board games.
There's a bit of an ongoing conversation about whether such a designation sort of marginalizes those games as serving a function, but not being games worth playing beyond such a designation. That's not really what I'm wading into today, as for me, a game has value if you enjoy playing it. What I'm getting into with this blog post is talking about which games really hooked me on the hobby, and of those games, which are the ones I still play.
In no particular order, these are the games I would argue really got me playing board games as a hobby: Settlers of Catan, Plague and Pestilence, Dominion, Puerto Rico, and Power Grid. When I was younger, I played Justice League Monopoly, but mainly because I loved the JLA. And I also played Risk. I thought of Risk as a very tactical game then, but was often frustrated by how badly dice rolls or "stupid" alliances could derail tactically sound plans. I never really made the connection that those latter frustrations meant my former assessment wasn't particularly accurate. But those were the only board games I played between elementary school and college. After college, I moved to Buffalo, NY. It was there I started playing D&D with some friends I met through theatre. Those same friends introduced me to the games I've listed at the beginning of this paragraph. I had no idea this world of games existed, and I latched on very quickly for the reasons so many do: I enjoyed spending nights in with people I enjoyed, and it was far cheaper and more satisfying to eat, drink, and play games at home than to go to a loud bar.
It makes me chuckle to look back, as the only reason we didn't play Puerto Rico more often was because "setup was so complicated." Obviously, the deeper into the hobby most of us go, the sillier that sounds. But at the time, Plague and Pestilence and Settlers set up so easily that Puerto Rico absolutely felt more involved or time-consuming. Power Grid is still on my shelf as one of my top ten games, and though it doesn't see play as often as I'd like, it's one that I really enjoy. I like the mechanics a lot, I think the play is fairly smooth, and I like the shape of the game. I still really enjoy the heck out of Puerto Rico, though there are other games with similar mechanics that do it better. But I'm never unhappy to get Puerto Rico to the table!
Dominion is a bit more of a mixed bag for me, simply because the game is so huge with so many expansions out there. I enjoy the game and am happy to play it, but I rarely go out of my way for deck-building games at this point. Clank! is an exception, for sure, and I don't know that I've ever said "no" to playing Dominion. but I've never been tempted to buy more than the base game and the Alchemy expansion, and I'm very rarely the first person to suggest the title.
I'd happily play Plague and Pestilence, but it's out of print and hard to find these days. I'm fairly certain that the only person I know who owns the game is my friend Ken, and as I no longer live in Buffalo, I don't game with him anymore. It's a fun, short little game! But at the current price point at which I've found it, I'm never going to end up buying it.
Settlers of Catan was the easiest one for me to drop and to which I'm not interested in returning. I've heard that the Knights expansion in particular makes the game that much more enjoyable. But I've played too many games of Catan in which my numbers don't come up and I just don't have anything to do, and with so many other games at my disposal, there's not really a reason for me to go back to it.
I played Axis and Allies in high school. I had the set up memorized. My grandma bought me Decipher's Star Wars Customizable Card Game starter, but I could never figure out the rules. I passed on opportunities to learn Catan in college (which I now regret), but then a coworker brought in Commands and Colors: Napoleonic to teach his history class about some famous battles I was intrigued. I discovered C&C Ancients and that was the beginning of my current game story. We picked up Agricola and Dominion not long after, then Terraforming Mars.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your gaming origins, Jacob! I had friends who played Axis and Allies, but we sort of never got around to it. If I'm not mistaken, that was junior high for me. I played a lot of card games, like Magic: the Gathering, Pokemon, and Young Jedi. But while I feel as though those informed my game-learning abilities (exhausting cards is just "tapping" them), they were only responsible for helping me learn games rather than inspiring me to seek them out, if that makes sense?
DeleteI don't know Commands and Colors, though, and now I'm intrigued!
Richard Borg designed a number of "light" war games based on historical eras. Memoir '44 is probably one of the most common and oldest versions. There's an American Civil War verse whose name escapes me, along with a WW1 version called The Great War. They, along with the Commands and Colors series (Ancients, Medieval, Napoleon, American War of Independence, Samurai) use the same basic format: a hand of command cards for ordering troops (drawn at random from a deck), a hex-board divided into Left, Center, and Right zones (which is relevant to some of the cards that say things like "Order 2 Units Center"). Units are color-coded as either Light, Medium, or Heavy, which relates to your attack die rolls. Borg also created a fantasy version called Battlelore, and a sci-fi version called Red Alert.
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