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| Does anybody know? |
Time has not been on my side this week with regard to
gaming. Work, family and band commitments has meant that the time I managed to
find to play games was restricted to this crossword game on my phone, which is
a great little app to download and play every so often. It is sometimes quite
strange that I can look at a clue for days and not know what it means, then
come back to it a week later and have the meaning perfectly clear in my head!
There’s really not that much more to say about Crosswords,
though, so instead of that I’m going to talk about hobby games for a bit.
There’s quite a bit to say, so this blog is a little longer than usual. I’ve
used the tag line on this blog a number of times, and I thought for today I
would do a piece about exactly what I mean when I say hobby games:
They’re games that you usually play on a table top with a
number of people, normally with some sort of tactile element to them such as
cards, dice or moving pieces. And I do enjoy playing them, when I get the
chance!
The first board game I can remember playing was Snakes and
Ladders; still popular to this very day! While it is a very simple game in
terms of its rules and structure, it’s a wonderful little way to engage with
people, particularly children. My family played it a lot when I was young, and
continued to do so all throughout my childhood. I have fond memories of playing
Cluedo, and my brother could play Monopoly at a very early age!
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| One of the few times I completed a 40K army. |
Getting in to games as a hobby came about when I was
thirteen and started collecting Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000. I still
enjoy it to this very day, over twenty years later, although I can never escape
the feeling that I’m still finding my feet with it to a large extent! I don’t
paint or play games with my models anywhere near enough to develop an
instinctive knowledge of the games, rules or painting techniques, but it hasn’t
gone anywhere and I’ve enjoyed it on and off through most of my life. I even
worked for Games Workshop at one point, although I wasn’t particularly good at that
either.
But it’s been within the last ten years or so that I’ve
really taken an interest in hobby games as a whole. It started with the Games
Workshop games, of course, but then my mate Dave introduced me to Yu-Gi-Oh, and
while collectable card games are probably the aspect of hobby games I enjoy the
least, it was always fun to play with him every now and then. Around the same
time I discovered Fantasy Flight games, and played some of their games over the
following years before discovering other game developers and publishers. I had
always wanted to find out what playing Dungeons and Dragons was like, so I
bought a starter set, found a public group of people who meet every week to
play Role Playing Games and got involved with that; that’s been a massive part
of my social life for a long time! I also started building up a large
collection of board games that, while few people seeing it for the first time
have a clue what it’s all about, they do find them interesting to look at!
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| I always enjoy this one! |
These days, I play hobby games as and when I can find the
time, which currently is not often. I’m fortunate enough to have a steady
roleplaying group that I meet with once a month, and I play a few games with my
girlfriend and her friends now and then. I make the UK Games Expo an important
date on my calendar every year! But I haven’t got the structure in my life at
the moment to attend hobby shops and groups regularly. Still, the games are
there if I need them!
Hobby games are in something of a “Golden Age” at the
moment, where new games are coming out every month and it’s no longer the
exclusive domain of unsociable nerds. Nonetheless, there’s a lot of it, and it
can be quite tricky to know what I’m talking about, so I thought I’d give you a
break-down of what I consider to be the four main categories, and my stake in
them:
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Board Games
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Collectable Card Games
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Role-Playing Games
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War Games
It was my original intention to write it all in this blog
post but I found the scope of that was too large for the format my blogs
usually take, so I’m going to write them a bit at a time instead, and release
them periodically. That should be a bit more interesting!
I recognise this!!!!
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