Games for every day Joes and Janes, all day, like it's your job. Updated every Mon - Wed - Fri
Published on October 29, 2008 By DorkCoffeez In Gaming

You might have heard that term before: "Core Gaming". It suggests that table top, board games, and to a lesser degree card games are the core of original gaming. I often feel back and forth on that statement. I am willing to concede that it was likely someone doing the parents-basement-gaming-thing that came up with a majority of the ideas surrounding modern gaming. Why they started with Pong I will never know but it seems likely. Born the arguable year of the Atari 2600 (if you add two years) my roots were in these sorts of simpler games just as much as they resided in the Magnavox Odyssey 300 (think the Atari pong but it looked like the last outfit from Kill Bill 1). Perhaps I haven't played a lot but what I have played... well I might have played too much of it.

With modern technology moving at the rate it is going at I get excited just as often as I get extremely annoyed. It is in these moments that I turn back to my "core" gaming and it seems that the small Demi-god that is Wizards of the Coast heard my prayers when I threw my PSP across the room cursing the name Mercury for the nineteenth time in two hours. In a thank you for some friendly beta keys from Stardock WotC sent a huge box of Magic: The Gathering cards. The heroine addict in my mind hit the cell bars of it's cage with such ferocity that I woke up hours later with booster pack wrappers all over and no clear memory of what happened.

I had played Magic the first year it came out and then on for about four years after that (some would describe it as the exact length of high school). Excuse the Dork speak for a moment but this part is for the players:

I had an all black and artifact deck I referred to as the "dark permission" deck. It was filled with Terrors, Royal Assassins, Thrall Pits, Lords of the Pit, Nightmares, and anything else that could kill any other creature or enchantment with just-because-I-can-powers. It was glorious. Now back to the program at hand....

Because I collected in the early days I had rare cards that came from the initial printings. When I went to sell my deck later on I bought my car to put the size of this game into perspective. So now almost every day in the lunch room I am teaching several members of Stardock how to play magic. It turns out our manager of software never gave it up in the some 20 years that it has been out. You can imagine he is excited to have players brewing in the wings. Thanks to this reawakening I blew dust off of my old D&D books, read a few choose-your-own-adventure books (with out cheating.... much), made fun of Pogs to my wife because I NEVER played them, bought the remake of Final Fantasy 3, played Final Fantasy on my original game boy (where RPG game time is not measured in hours but batteries used), and broke out the emulators to rock out some Altered Beast. A dork midlife crisis never rocked out so hard.

Thank you Wizards of the Coast. Should I be lucky enough to have any of them read this article I have a small request: If you use my reacquired soul to run an appliance in your building I would like that I be used in the code box for the upcoming Character builder/visualizer/Dungeon Builder/D&D Gaming Table. If that isn't possible I would like to be the coffee machine.

Seabass


Comments
on Oct 29, 2008

I guess I must be nine years older than God as i have no idea what you are talking about

 

Be well.

on Oct 30, 2008

I never really got into Magic and thank goodness. I do remember a couple of friends trying to 'push' there habbit on me, but I stopped short of buying once they told me how much they had already spent on their 'habbit'. Too scarey for a meager student on a real tight budget.

For me 'core' gaming never really left, but I do feel that I've just awoken from a long hibernation.

Being married and having kids has now given me a new passion for it, but its games like Catan, Carcassonne and even the odd hand of Citadels is now more appealing than the long sessions of AD&D, Starfleet battles or the War Hammer campaigning of old.

 

on Oct 30, 2008

The money is scary and drove me away but not totally for the same reasons. I will elaborate:

Lunch at high school this guy that took the game way over the top (if you are a dork there is one of these for every game and we all know one). He spend thousands on his deck and then hundreds more to get these specific cards to build what he considered the perfect strategic kill. It was simple and as follows (even if you have no idea what I am talking about this is funny):

Get out the goblin bazooka. This would do a point of damage to anything and anyone for every creature you sacrificed to it. (Each player has 20 points of life and if you kill the other guy, you win... duh).

There were these ghosts that when they were killed they would come back to life once two other creatures were killed after them, it was their special power. Well if you had three of them you sacrificed the first, then the second, then the third, and the first one came back out.... and you just kept doing that forever. Thus your goblin gun of doom could do unlimited damage. He paid just over 150 for each of those ghosts. He then hit my friend with a "Haha! I do unlimited damage! You lose!"

My friend playing against the crazy wallet breaker whips out a twenty five cent card that changes all damage to life for that turn. "Ha ha! I have unlimited life. YOU lose."

I quit playing that afternoon just to cure the headache.

 

on Oct 30, 2008

Key phrase: twenty-five cent card.

Epic.

on Oct 30, 2008

I quit playing that afternoon just to cure the headache.

Wow. I forgot the non-money side of why I ran away quickly from the collector-card games. The beauty of a ref rolling dice behind a screen is that you can count on the good ones to keep that sort of stuff away from you.

Well, I ran away also because I'm old enough that they were only just rolling out things like MtG when my friends and I began getting too distracted with things like jobs, non-gaming lovers, actually studying, or actually running around outside to play. During my deepest "core gaming" period, we spent 10-20 hours per weekend on real RPGs (I've yet to see one on the computer that deserves the name--they're all just tactical combat with lots of decisions) and played things like spades (plain old playing cards), Car Wars, and Illuminati for breaks.

And then there was the glory that was Civilization, the tabletop game. Unlike the RPGs, I don't miss that stuff at all in comparison to its PC-based descendants.

on Oct 30, 2008

Well, I ran away also because I'm old enough that they were only just rolling out things like MtG when my friends and I began getting too distracted with things like jobs, non-gaming lovers, actually studying, or actually running around outside to play. During my deepest "core gaming" period, we spent 10-20 hours per weekend on real RPGs (I've yet to see one on the computer that deserves the name--they're all just tactical combat with lots of decisions) and played things like spades (plain old playing cards), Car Wars, and Illuminati for breaks.

Life does that to you.

CRPGs are a joke in comparison to real RPGs, but at least I don't have to keep track of a dozen+ rule books, 10+ sided dice, and long sessions surrounded by guy's who think bathing is an option. 

Still my partner is now addicted to Carcassone. Its a lot of fun seeing the intense concerntration and effort of a non-gamer put into tile layout and screwing me over. I only hope she doesn't want go all 'core' on me.

 

on Oct 30, 2008

If you are refering to the board game of Carcassone (which I do not think you are but still) we refer to it as "Pirates" and we play it every day at none at lunch.

The one that we play is a short game where you try to get all 6 pirates to the end boat before anyone else does.

on Oct 31, 2008

If you are refering to the board game of Carcassone (which I do not think you are but still) we refer to it as "Pirates" and we play it every day at none at lunch. The one that we play is a short game where you try to get all 6 pirates to the end boat before anyone else does.

Actually I'm referring to the tile laying game Carcassonne - you know the one with the wooden meeples. I'm not sure whether we're on the same page, but "pirates" sounds interesting.

My partner loved it so much I was pressured into buying four of the expansion packs to extend the tile sets and add more pieces to the game. The game lasts between a 1/2 hour to 2 depending on whether all the expansion packs are put in. Great game.

on Nov 02, 2008

No I missunderstood. That game IS played by the game team near every day though.