Games - to Display or not to Display?

 My geek cred is pretty strong. It started around age 8 or 9 when my parents, avid swap meet and garage sale patrons (like a lot of immigrant types), would occasionally bring me stacks of comics. That started a collection that by adulthood had grown into several long boxes of mostly silver age stuff. 

My next intro to things geeky was probably an old copy of The Hobbit one of my older bros (non-geeks to be sure; oldest brother was a local biker-like badass, and my next oldest was all-city in several sports) left lying around. By the time I discovered D&D around age 13 I had read the LOTR trilogy a couple of times (plus a little Conan and others). So things comics, and things D&D were my main hobbies (besides playing sports myself - a local sports hero's younger brother is going to be forced to dabble). I surfed from around age 14-21, but as I grew up on the beach that was more of a lifestyle than sport or hobby. Comics and RPGS were the lifelong loves, though I pretty much stopped buying comics on the reg by age 25 or so. 

When you are young you love to display things you like. But for me coming up in a time when D&D and other games were more or less underground despite TSR's soon marketing to the general teeming masses, I treated it like a secret society. When I went to the secretive D&D club ("The Fantasy Role Playing Association" - sheesh) after football practice I snuck there with the James Gunn theme playing in the background so as not to be seen by my non-geek friends.

 It was an odd hobby, and I kind of dug the furtive nature of it then. I always stashed my gaming stuff away in drawers and closets in case my sports pals came over (or my earliest girlfriends - though by around 17 years old or so some girls I met were into D&D). Things I displayed were the usual rock posters and such. My D&D buddies were less furtive; they had minis and books and all kinds of stuff all over their rooms. 

I'm still not much of a hobby-displayer. I'm always kind of trying to minimize my life. When I left my hometown for a new city a few short years ago I pretty much tossed out about half my life. Clothes, furniture, and a lot of collectibles. Some action figures, fandom books (including things like my decades old Star Trek technical manual) and other things that were not exactly mint on card. I currently own exactly ONE small bookshelf, and its more for holding a few favored books and gifts from friends. Well, not exactly displayed. More like just tossed on there to keep them off the living room table...

My D&D stuff still stays stashed in a closet, more to get it out of the way than out of embarrassment. But with my current main hobby (outside of video gaming, playing music, and a couple other things) is boardgames. 

Above: me indulging in other things with non-gamer pals 

in Northern Cali...

As I mentioned in other posts, my board gaming passion only started around 3 years ago. My only real boardgame love for decades was Talisman. But I discovered Will Wheaton's Tabletop show and was dazzled by the incredible games being played there. I moved to a new town where I didn't know anybody. I made some friends at the local comic/game shop, but then I found some of the personalities in the local gaming community, especially that of board gaming, kind of boring, outside of my soon to be besties B and L and some of their local friends.

We teamed up to turn non-gamers
into gamers. Nice, eh?

 So with good friends eager to play I started collecting games I had seen on that show (or just saw at a store and had to have). My collection grew exponentially in the last couple years...

Have a couple of editions, but the one with
the phallic standee is a classic.

I'm probably leaving one or two out, but it doesn't take a lot of boardgames to make quite a pile. They outgrew the couple of lower shelves, and I pretty much had them stacked on the living room floor. But with my best friends being out of town for a few months in the earlier parts of the year (they travel to warmer climes to avoid the snow and such we get here near the Sierras), this is kind of my board gaming downtime. So, with pre-spring cleaning they go from the living room into some boxes in the office upstairs until such time as boardgame "season" comes back around.

My board game collection as currently displayed.

In some ways it's kind of a shame. These modern boardgame boxes are beautiful to look at.  I've seen some huge collections of boardgames displayed, and they look amazing. The hosts of my latest D&D campaign must have a hundred boardgames, and they are displayed around the house on a half dozen shelves. And there is a brew pub in town that had hundreds of games available to play. I've played a few games there with B & L, or other local friends, and it's a great atmosphere. I've even gone in there by myself on a quiet Sunday to have a couple ales and just stare at the walls...

So lonely...but fuck, look at all those games!

But honestly, in the spirit of minimalization, I have to resist the shelf thing. As I have for years, I get my artsy display ya-ya's out by hanging stuff on the walls. Mostly things with some personal importance.

More of a religious thing really, 
but counts as a display

Given to me over a decade ago
when Pearl Jam was a client 
at my office. 

Both an art and activity. I like to 
switch different comics in and out
of the frames from time to time.

Just as an aside, there can be a great display out of the box. I gave my pals a beautiful little game that they like to play (it's a two-player game so I don't have it) on their travels, but also keep it out as a nice model display...

OK, so as for my collection of board games, I am going to try and keep it down to the three boxes. But these boxes are pretty much full. There are at least a couple more games I'd like to own, so to fit I will need to eliminate a couple. The most likely choices for elimination are...

Really loving that box art.

OK, well, Munchkin can be fun, but honestly two things turn me off from playing it after the first couple tries. Basically, for what you get out of it, it takes too long. It can take over an hour. Both times we played it was closer to an hour and a half. For a game that is almost all whimsy, it should really be like other whimsical games I like such as King of Tokyo and Epic Spell Wars. A game should take a half hour or less. To me this is the big turnoff. A game that takes upwards of an hour and a half should have a bit more real meat on it. 

As for the Gloomhaven spin-off, well, I have some reasons there that I will save for a later post as the reasons I got it are quite specific. 

But long and short here and to wrap this post up, I will for the time being be keeping the games in the boxes, and my artsy side will just have to stay up on the walls. Out of the way. 

Munchkin and Call to Adventure

 So far I've made posts about boardgames I had played the hell out of in the last couple of years. But on Christmas Day I was able to try two games that are new to me. 

With my nearest family members living hours away, and me hating any kind of holiday travel, I was going to stay in town and hopefully see some of the local friends I've managed to make the last couple years.

My besties B & L (a younger couple who kind of adopted me when I had first moved to my new town) came over to spend Christmas afternoon with me and eat slow cooker chili, drink beer, wine, and cider (maybe a little smokey smokey) and play some games. We had a certain window of time; whenever they would drive the half hour to my part of town they would usually come around 4 or 5 and hang till 9. But a powerful winter snow storm was due at some point. A predicted 4 inches. They have a big truck but currently live in a rural part of town that doesn't have priority for snow plowing. So they came around noon and we put the chili cooker on to bubble and settled in quick to try a couple of new games as snowflakes began to slowly accumulate outside.

Munchkin is of course an infamous game that I have wanted to try since impulse buying the deluxe edition a couple months ago. Call to Adventure was given to me by B & L on the Thanksgiving I spent with them and their local friends. Having not heard of it (it never appeared on the Will Wheaton Tabletop show where I was exposed to most games I currently love) I kind of had doubts about it. 

I spent a couple hours Christmas Eve trying to teach myself Call to Adventure. The rules are a wee bit hard to grasp on whole at first, but as soon as you know the basics you wondered why you thought it was complicated. Its not really. Besides the character/story building aspects, things like memorizing what various runes mean seem hard on the surface but in like two minutes you got it. The first game will go slower mostly from trying to correctly pick out the needed runes for your challenges. But after a couple of turns we were in full swing, not having to look up advanced rules until the need came up.

The second game goes much faster (game one was around an hour and a half, the second a bit less than an hour). 

It's a fairly quaint and dare I say maybe a bit elegant game engine. It goes from awkward to intuitive fairly quickly.  You basically start with an origin card (you are a hunter, farmer, merchant, etc), a motivation card (Bound by honor, seeking vengeance, etc) and a destiny card that spells out your final fate and what points you get at the end for various other cards you obtained that relate to the destiny card. 

Runes stand for the usual character traits; strength, dex, con, Widom. You cast runes representing how many of these you have to defeat challenges that get you more cards to expand your story cards. 

The character and story building elements, that you have a lot of control over, promotes role playing and storytelling by default. B & L are not community theater rpg types by a long shot. But they extrapolated their cards into compelling stories. 

What really struck me was the spirituality aspects built into the game. In my late teens and eearly twenties I had a period of exploring many religious, spiritual and occult things. So I was famiar with rune casting. And there is a lot about the relating of various cards here that reminds me a lot of reading tarot. Exploring the artwork imagery to expand upon the card relations even further helps foster the storytelling fun of the game. 

OK, the storm was on. Snow was coming in sideways. But it was not packing significantly. So my pals decided to stick around long enough to get in a game of Munchkin (it was around an hour).

I personally found it clunky at first. Pulling high level monsters you had no chance against, and constantly having to ditch cards. If you have too many you cannot discard. You have to give them to other players. So it seemed there would be a lot of crap cards going back and forth a lot. But very quickly things started tying together so you could use more cards, and as levels were gained the more powerful monsters you could fight. Just like D&D, how about that? 

It is an amusing RPG parody, but I think the game play has to potential to be kinda deep. I didn't think I'd like it much due to the level of the whimsy in the artwork, but the nods to D&D really won me over.

The storm deepened and B and L hit the road. Our exploring these new games was the highlight of my long weekend, and can't wait to play more. New Years weekend?

I need to play both of these games a bit more to have a final verdict, but they made for a fun few hours. A heavy role-playing game and a not so much one. I'll post more in the future about both games and will also try the solo feature Call to Adventure includes. 

Merry Chirstmas and Happy New Year!