Do you remember the moment you fell down the rabbit hole?

One sentence though! I could write a novel. Not gonna. Stupid Magic… :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

[EDIT] PS I think you’re the only person I’ve ever met who knows Jyhad as Jyhad.

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I kind of have to refer to it that way, because while I loved Jyhad, I never bought any of the rebranded cards. Four of us played with what we had for a long time before we left for different universities.

If I were to play Vampire: the Eternal Struggle with the die-hard fans in Osaka, one of whom is a friend of mine, I wouldn’t call it Jyhad. I kind of feel that ship has sailed though.

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My friend tried to get me back into it (V:TM) a few years down the road and it just didn’t stick. That’s the weird thing about CCGs—there aren’t many rabbit holes that go deeper, but holy crap when you’re done with 'em you just hop right back out and go on your merry way.

[EDIT] Thinking of the huge number of games I tried back when the craze was hot, it’s kind of amazing just how bad a lot of them actually were. Anyone remember Wyvern?

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So many! Yes, I had some (very few) Wyvern cards. Shadowfist, Rage… I think I’ve forgotten most of them.

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We had some friends that really got into Spellfire. I never cared much for it though we dove into Blood Wars for a little while.

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Hmm, I guess it would have to be 6th grade or so, when a friend introduced us to Top Secret S.I.. We were reading really simplified Greek mythologies in school, so we kept making characters with codenames from the stories. It wasn’t until some time later when I picked up the rule books myself that I learned we were playing the game totally wrong. We still had great fun with the game, though.

This same friend also had the D&D box sets and we pressured him into running us througj a game. He really wasn’t interested, so he just threw us up against a green dragon and killed us, but me and one of my friends still liked the idea of a fantasy game, so we got our own copies and made up two characters each, one of us would GM, the other would make all the decisions but we both got to participate as our characters in combats. He pretty much became my sole gaming partner until high school. Somewhere in there I picked up the AD&D rule books and monstrous compendiums, which we played the same way.

We went to the same high school, which had a gaming club! Run by a priest! Amazing! There was a closet just full of games, and a filing cabinet full of various RPG’s. The teacher ran AD&D games a few times a year, with something like 10-12 of us playing in them. Being high schoolers, they were pretty ridiculous in the long run, but the teacher kept them pretty comedic, and lethal at the same time.

These games were the spawning point of great characters.

Torgon the Dragon-Hearted, a fighter who had once been polymorphed into a dragon and occasionally the personality would reassert itself, making him fight “tooth and claw” in combat, attempt to light the campfire with his breath, “fly” from rooftops, and eat bits of his kills raw. Thankfully he had rings of feather fall and resistance to disease. Yep, he was one of mine.

Sir Derek, the paladin, who would slap people in order to perform the laying of hands ability.

And the ever popular Tommy, the Green Ranger with his animal follower, Louis, the paladin swan.

It was here I played games like Axis and Allies, Fortress America, Fury of Dracula, Space Hulk, Talisman, Diplomacy, Nuclear War, Awful Green Things from Outer Space, and so many others. I was then the first of the group to try out Magic the Gathering, though if it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else, as it became a hit with all of us, and could all be found playing it at break and lunch. A renewed love of Star Wars (thanks to Timothy Zahn’s novels) had me eventually move on to the Star Wars CCG by Decipher (and also the West End Games SW RPG), but I still played Magic, too.

College was a bit of a gaming break for me, as it took some time to find people with my gaming interests, but eventually found some people who introduced me to Star Fleet Battles, the Star Trek tactical game with rules resembling tax documents. Also got into White Wolf RPG’s with the same group. During breaks and summers, I got to spend time with my high school friends and game with them, which was fun.

After college, it was another gaming break, as I did not move back home and was not close to my college gaming friends either. Eventually started hanging out with them occasionally after I got a car. I had randomly picked up Carcassonne at some point and we played that now and then, and my friend had Betrayal at House on the Hill, which I fell in love with.

Did not really go beyond this and Munchkin until Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop series, where I saw many interesting games that I knew I wanted to try. Came across SU&SD some time later and found even more amazing games. And now I can build a cabin out of board games. Yay?

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Just the fact that there’s another soul on earth who was affected by Top Secret/S.I. makes me incredibly happy. What a marvelous bloody game.

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That was what it was when I played it. Just the once, when someone else had brought some; I don’t like buying a pig in a poke so the CCG model is incompatible with me.

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Ticket to Ride made me realise that new board games were a thing
Pandemic completely widened my idea of what a board game could be/do
But my first game of Cosmic Encounter was what sent me down the rabbit hole. Strategy + Hilarity + Different every time = sold.

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I was in middle school when MtG hit stores and basically all of my geeky, affluent friends immediately pounced on it. My family wasn’t poor (by any stretch of the imagination) but after buying a starter deck and two or three booster packs and then getting told, after the disappointment of opening the boosters that I didn’t get anything interesting, “Oh, well, you’ll need to buy more booster packs” really turned me off.

I still played; like I said, my friends with bigger allowances than mine were all in so whenever we were hanging out, I’d dig through their extra cards to build my own decks - afterwards some of them would just give me the cards since I rarely used their “good” cards.

I was quite a bit more interested in Star Trek CCG when it arrived which I collected more than I had a chance to play up.

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When I was little my Dad bought Scotland Yard and Escape from Atlantis that we used to play together twice a week. I made a sign for the door when we played. I stayed excited by games and forced my family to play Risk occasionally as well as plenty of whist, rummy and hearts.

Then my best friend’s brother let me paint a space marine. It took me a year to get my Dad to cave in. Originally it was for “older boys”. He was right, but my insistence didn’t let up. That started a good 5 year stretch where 40K, Necromunda, Space Marine, Blood Bowl and Warhammer Quest were my social life (Quest was always shit though).

Then there was a year or 2 when I discovered girls and recreational activities before realising i could combine these things in to 1 life. So a week after turning 18 I was hired for a GW retail job and that was that for the next 5 years. In the mean time I started going to a games club to play 40K initially, but soon started getting roped in to joining board and card games. Then Confrontation took over. Still my favourite minis game. Really elevated the art for me. It’s the reason i just can’t play GW games anymore. Having tasted the quality of design I can’t go back to that drivel. The poor balance and uninteresting play are like ash in my mouth now.

The games I was being roped in to were mainly euros and war games with some dudes on a map. The games I still own from era are Attika and RoboRally. They were also some of the games that moved me across. As tome went on games like Vikings and On the Underground joined in. There was one guy who’d bring a new game every week and refuse to play a game a second time so he could keep his 100% record. So I played a lot of different games with him and then a lot of the dame game with my Confrontation group.

I then had a falling out with a couple of my main gaming buddies so I missed Dominion and so on. 2014 was when I started again. Cosmic was early as was Theseus: The Dark orbit. Terra Mystica happened early but the one that blew my mind was Keyflower. With that I was obsessed again and it started off the quest for aggressive, interactive games that would get my mind working again. It hasn’t stayed all that way, but I definitely like my games heavy on decisions and like a blend of strategy and tactics with a slight tilt to tactics. If it’s all strategy, why play the game? (Warmachine being the minis game I most associate with why? But some silly editions of 40k too)

Tl:dr I like games and have played them almost all throughout my life

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Oh, I played Magic from like 4th or 5th grade through…early high school, maybe? (though it was banned at school after the first year - I guess some kid had their cards stolen or something? So we all switched to the Star Trek CCG, and then, weirdly, the SimCity CCG. Who here remembers that? :stuck_out_tongue: )
But it wasn’t when I got hooked on these games. Also, I ended up much preferring Jyhad (which I bought piles of on the cheap when they had to rebrand)/V:TES and Netrunner, just could never get people to play them. And I had a bunch of Spellfire, also. God, that was a bad game. No resources = no balance.

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I had completely forgotten about that one!

I gave all my cards to my mom who loved Sim City. She probably still has them somewhere (she never actually played the game, despite best intentions)

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September 2013

I got what was supposed to be my dream job at Plymouth University. As it was going to be such a big upheaval, to make sure it was the right thing I moved down there alone and lived in a joint house while my wife and boys stayed in Cardiff. I came home every Friday evening and went back on Monday mornings.

One of the guys in the team I worked with was very much into games, and because I hated being away from the family so much, I spent a lot of time with him as his wife (who was also in the department), plus a couple of others.

After I’d been down there 3 weeks, Phil was really excited because he’d got hold of the Betrayal at the House on the Hill reprint. I watched a Will Wheaton YouTube video on how to play.

I loved it, so different to anything I’d played as a child or an adult (I’d loved the usual Monopoly and Risk etc). Ticket to Ride, Mansions of Madness First edition followed.

The job didn’t work out, but as a leaving present they got me Dominion and Forbidden Island as a leaving present. My wife likes gaming and so do the kids. The rest is a gaping hole in our bank balance!

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For me there was an old UK magazine called Arcade. It was sort of created I think to be A multi format magazine adjacent to Edge magazine which is a more serious video game magazine (in its early era it broke down the components of the Sega Saturn for example) compared to those with jokes etc.

Anyway in one of the non video game columns was a review of a game called Ticket to Ride. It wasn’t until I got a my current and Career job in about 2008 (and some nerd friends) that I was able to buy the game that started it with that article.

Edit: the dates are all damn wrong. I sort of knew this but I didn’t believe it until I found myself hunting for scans of the magazine. Anyway it turns out the game I saw was Union Pacific and not Ticket to Ride. The suspicion had existed because TTR very blatantly won the SdJ in 2005 but I distinctly read the magazine in pre 2001 because I bought the magazine by smuggling it into my parents shopping.

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Not exactly a rabbit hole just a slow decline into boardgames… they arrived in several waves:

  • 1996: This is the first wave. Day 1 at university, I run straight into a group of role+MtG+players (somehow those two went hand in hand at the time). After so many computer rpgs, here at last I encounter the Real Thing™. It is so exciting and quickly becomes my most expensive hobby (both rpg books and magic cards). We play boardgames as well–when the DMs need a break–and I visit SPIEL for the first time. Games I remember from that time: Catan, Carcassonne, Talisman, Robo Ralleye (definitely everyone’s favorite). There is one particularly “wild” night of German politics with the original Die Macher and another exploring early evolution with Ursuppe. I buy City of Chaos randomly and we play days on one single game… but boardgames are still eclipsed by roleplaying in a big way for many years.
  • 2005: The second wave begins when friends introduce us to Arkham Horror, Betrayal and Shadows over Camelot for long evenings and nights of gaming but still more RPGs than boardgames.
  • 2012: The third wave starts just as our RPG game groups all contract the “I have to work tomorrow”-syndrome and we start to go to SPIEL more regularly. We discover and watch Tabletop and buy so many of the games only to find out our taste doesn’t always mesh with the show–nevertheless it helped along broadening our knowledge of what games exist. That year just before SPIEL, I hear about this game Terra Mystica from a new publisher called Feuerland… I pre-order it. The gameplay is a revelation and an immediate favorite. I play my first 2 handed solos because I cannot get enough of it. In the following years I prepare for SPIEL religiously… going through lists of games and figuring out which ones to try or preorder so as not to miss any other potential Terra Mysticas.
  • 2018: the 4th wave starts slowly when the Pegasus version of Spirit Island arrives on the scene and that was the beginning of the final descent into what I am now. Of course, it’s sold out at Spiel. The horror. I have to wait until my FLGS gets it. I play at least 2 dozen solos until Christmas… and still love the game (cannot wait to get my hands on Jagged Earth)
  • 2019, September. The End. After always saying I was never going to play that monster of a game, I see Matt’s Gloomhaven review and the rest is history.
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I feel like acquiring the taste for big campaign board games indicates a new rabbit hole to go down in and of itself. Uh oh!

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Kickstarter has been my ruin. (And I’m loving it.)

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“I can stop any time I want!”

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I just don’t want to yet

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Came here to say Heroquest, delighted to see it all over the thread already.

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