This seems like it was another life (maybe it was; the universe feels fractal).
Back in the early 90s, I mostly played computer games (MUDs, mostly) and console games. Quite suddenly, I found myself in middle school and surrounded by Pogs; I collected some, but I recall playing… uh, maybe twice? The game wasn’t as cool as the just looking at the pogs.
But it setup me and my friends for the next big thing: Magic: the Gathering. By the time it came to be known by me, people were playing Revised edition, but I mainly got started in 4th. I, however, never spent as much money on it as any of my friends (I lived in a well-to-do area, but we didn’t have a lot of disposable income). After a while, I mostly gave up collecting cards for myself and would assemble awful, terrible decks from the unused cards of whomever I was hanging out with so that we could play – or, later, when it became more of a “thing”, I would just use one of their spare decks.
Once High School started, I had mostly reverted back to computer games (mostly MUDs, still). My stepdad at one point introduced me and 2 of my friends to Dungeons & Dragons and I got the AD&D 2e trifecta for Christmas that year (The Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and the Monstrous Manual). Unsurprisingly, me and all of my not-quite-social-butterfly friends joined the school’s Role Playing & Games Club, hosted in the library on Thursday after school – all made possible because my older sister was driving to/from school then and was willing to shuttle me and a friend because she also had a number of friends in the club.
As part of RP&G Club, I was introduced to Warhammer; both Fantasy and 40k; I bought a few models for both, but never fielded an army; most people in the club just used pieces of paper (for fantasy) or proxied with the starter box, plastic minis for 40k. Blood for the Blood God!
As a distraction one summer, I convinced my mother to buy me the Necromunda starter set which my friends and I played a lot (by many, many mistaken rules). I still have it, actually, and I sometimes wonder what it would be like to get it out again. I put the new edition of Necromunda on my wishlist a few years ago but nobody bought it for me, and I believe it’s probably hard to find now – and I don’t even know how much I would enjoy it (it may be wildly different… or… maybe… maybe I’d be wildly different?). Eventually, I did buy a complete mini set for Van Saar, but I never assembled or painted them.
One year, quite unexpectedly, some of my friends started playing Illuminati: New World Order , which seemed just the panacea for the “Magic the Gathering is too expensive to enjoy” slump me and many of my friends whose parents didn’t have quite as much money to toss around. A collectable card game where you could just buy a complete set of the cards – long before “Living Card Games” “invented” it. I still have my One With Everything box that includes the expansion. A friend of mine told me, probably 5 years ago, that he finally sold his because he got more than $500 for it – but I refuse to sell. Imagine my dismay when, later, I played the 2018 Illuminati and found it utterly transparent and lackluster; was INWO the same and I just couldn’t see it back then?
At some point during high school, my parents bought me a computer with a graphics card and I started playing almost exclusively video games for a while, and that persisted after I left high school and into the early 2000s.
I had moved around a bit in my late-teens and early-twenties and eventually fell in with a mixed group of people I went to high school with but also some other geeks that were all living together. Unfortunately, Everquest and then World of Warcraft were things at the time; I played the former quite a bit during my moving-around phase, but never as much as most of my friends. I played WoW but really only for about 2 weeks as a way to engage with that friend group. Eventually we grew apart (most of them play FFXIV now, I think).
But during the time I was spending time with that group, we did play a few games. I remember, specifically,
Sid Meier’s Civilization: The Boardgame (2002), which I was fascinated by, but of which my friends grew quickly tired, much to my dismay. I believe we played almost a full game of it. Other than that, I think it was mostly Risk that was played.
It would be several years later, after being introduced to Apples to Apples one evening, and then later attending a local gaming convention with my then-girlfriend-now-wife when we sat down with a friend of hers from high school and he showed us some board games he had discovered by watching Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop. This would prove to be the catalyst to get me to look beyond the bad box art and see boardgames in a different light. But all of that occurred after 2005.
