In The Zeitgeist

Among the older games in my top 10 games list are several from the old school game company Avalon Hill. I’ve already posted about one of them on this blog. It was kind of inevitable for any nerdy gamer in the 70s or 80s who was into thoughtful strategy games to get caught up in this particular series. Another Avalon Hill game I played a good bit of in high school was Diplomacy, #9 on my list.

Diplomacy is a game of recreating the Great Power conflicts in Europe of the early 20th century, and had mechanics where you made alliances to support other players’ military campaigns. But the actual moves were written down secretly and simultaneously, which created an opportunity for backstabbing. It was a very tense and fun game for this reason.

In high school, we had a fun “live action” format (like PBEM before email) where one person would act as referee, handing out paper copies of the map’s current state to the players, and collecting everyone’s moves in written form. The moves were due once or twice a week, and if you didn’t turn them in or they were confusing to the ref, they would just revert to your units holding. The ref would calculate the new game state and hand out maps again. Our tools for making the maps were markers and photocopiers.

This was a great format because it meant that during the days when players were plotting their moves, they could easily meet in private to negotiate all their diplomatic shenanigans. Backstabbing was easier too because you could double-deal without the other players having any inkling of what you were doing, though there was always the chance for real life spying and eavesdropping to try to figure out what deals the other players were making. It was exciting and engaging and we got in a few games in my time in high school.

In college, I played with friends in the Wargamers Club, which was the only club I ever joined there. We only played Diplomacy around the table, but in a big room in the student center where people could meander off to the edges for their diplomatic discussions. It’s not as good a format as “live action,” but there were still shenanigans since you could talk to everyone whether or not you were actually coordinating with them, to disguise your true intentions. You could try to outsmart other players with deceitful negotiations, and the tension would build until you got to the glorious moment of a successful betrayal. Or you might suffer the ignominy of being betrayed yourself. Great fun.

One time I played a game that wasn’t so much fun, because some players didn’t seem to get the game. Really, they just played differently than what I was used to. I wrote a session report about it here: A Game without Double-Dealing, or, Don’t These Guys Know How to Play Diplomacy?

After college, I don’t think I ever played Diplomacy again. The closest game to it that I have played since then is A Game of Thrones (yes, based on the familiar series), which also has players coordinating moves and potentially backstabbing one another. I did have one great moment in Game of Thrones, which you can read about here: A Machiavellian Move in a Game of Thrones.

I’m not sure why I never played after school. The spirit of Diplomacy just wasn’t there in my new gaming circles, I guess, but I will always have fond memories of the game from my past.

One of my favorite old games is Titan, from Avalon Hill. I have played it since all the way back in high school. I’ve also mentioned it on this blog already. It’s one of my top 10 games on BoardGameGeek; in fact, it’s #10 on the list on my BGG profile, which means that it’s the oldest, not that it’s the least favorite.

It’s both a wargame and a fantasy themed board game, so there’s just no denying its appeal. It combines the delight of building armies of fantastic monsters with the thrill of rolling large amounts of dice in combat.

I played a lot when I was young; it was surely one of the more popular games among my circles as a teenager. I even wrote a BoardGameGeek session report about a game I played back in the early 1980s: Bad Luck in a Long Ago Game of Titan.

As I got older, I found fewer people willing to play. I did have a few friends who played in the late 1990s into the 2000s. That was when I developed a variant I called “Tactical Titan,” where you build a huge map and focus on the combat, ignoring the higher level strategy map. I actually hand made my own maps, coloring in hex paper, but photocopying the existing game components and assembling a map is another way it could work.

I devised scenarios, with special maps that had limited types of terrain and thus limited the monsters used. I came up with magic items that could be seeded on the map and would enhance the monsters in combat. There were some new rules to accomodate the large tactical map, and new monster types. This is similar to variants other Titan fans have come up with.

I managed to rope a few players into this version of the game, and played a lot of two-player games with one particular friend who sadly passed away in the early 2000s.

Later, I developed another variant that got a slight amount of play. It was called “Campaign Titan” and the idea was that your Titan (the leader of your armies) would earn XP from game to game and level up as a character, picking up all kinds of abilities, even spells. Again, I only got a few players into it (I think two total) and this version did not get played much, so the rules I have written around it are largely untested.

The last time I played Titan was probably in 2015. It’s just hard to find people interested in this kind of game, and willing to commit to the long hours it takes to play all the way through.

I have a bunch of pages on my gamer site devoted to the Titan variants I created here: Steve’s Titan Corner. You can also find links there to the content that other Titan fans have created. We old grognards are still out there, showing our devotion to this classic game!

Over on BoardGameGeek I have a list of my Top 10 Games. These are the board games that have been my favorites or that I have played the most over the years. I am putting together a GeekList that fills in the details of why I like each game and how it fits into my board game biography, and thought it made sense to share each entry here on the blog as well. They might be likelier to get read coming out one at a time, maybe once a week or so for a while.

So here is the first top 10 game, actually a card game, not a board game. It is #4 on the list on my BGG profile. And that game is…

Magic: The Gathering

This is the first and foremost in a category of games called “collectible card games” which feature a basic rule structure and a large assortment of cards. Players build their own decks out of the cards they buy, and can always get more (hence “collectible”) to enhance or modify their decks. You play games with these decks, with two or more players, though usually four or five is the limit. According to the AI generated search results I just read, as of early 2024 there are over 27,000 distinct Magic cards, so good luck trying to collect them all. You don’t need to do that, though, to have a good deck to play.

Magic: The Gathering debuted at GenCon in 1993, when I was still living in Virginia, prolonging my college party days. I still played lots of Dungeon and Dragons back then, and was only just beginning to be exposed to the new wave of board games coming out of Germany. I remember when Magic was introduced to our gaming circles, and the huge buzz it caused. I attended GenCon in Milwaukee in either 1994 or 1995, and recall the excitement in the air there from all the obsessed players.

The game was innovative for its time, and was hugely popular in my circles throughout the 1990s. Interestingly, it attracted most of the same people who were into D&D, probably because of the rich fantasy theme. I have many fond memories of late night D&D sessions as well as late night Magic games with the same groups. Even after those old game groups split up as people moved apart to carry on with their lives, we would occasionally get back together for a nostalgic weekend, and usually it was Magic that got played.

I moved around a bit at the turn of the century, and didn’t get to play Magic much for awhile. In the late 2000s I tried getting back into the game by going to game stores, but the vibe had changed. It was more about keeping up with the latest releases, spending the money to get the better cards, and making ruthless decks. The new generation was using new terms and playing by different rules than I remembered. I wrote a session report about one time I entered a tournament and found myself completely in over my head: Magic: The Gathering – My first tournament.

In 2010 I attended GenCon again, for the first time since the 90s. I didn’t play any Magic, but I was flabbergasted by how huge the room was where Magic was being played. Thousands of players dueling in an enormous warehouse type room. Just amazing how far the game had come. And I can tell you why it’s so popular: it’s a really good design. It has nice tension built into it with the way cards are played using mana from lands, and with the way it mixes the luck of the draw and the skill of good deck construction.

Throughout the 2010s I did have a few more gatherings with old friends in which a nice round or two of Magic got played. It was fun to break out the old decks and relive those carefree times. Whenever this would happen, I would get bit by the deckbuilding bug and spend some time on my own retooling my decks, only to stash them all away to wait for the next reunion in a year or two. One funny memory I have is of all us old timers sitting around the table at night playing Magic, but having to put on reading glasses and squint in the dim light to read our cards.

I’m happy to say that I am still playing Magic: The Gathering today. Lucky me, my stepson has recently gotten into it, and pulled his mother in as well. So I get to play with my family and my stepson’s friends. We play a format called Commander, which I personally like a lot. I like it beacuse the games tend to start slowly, so you can relish the build up, but then typically come to a crashing end without dragging on for too long, once the good combos of cards come out. We’ve bought quite a few preconstructed Commander decks, including some from licensed franchises, which we tweak a bit. I have a pretty mean Dalek deck from the Magic: The Gathering Universes Beyond – Doctor Who product line.

I’m sure I will always be into playing Magic: The Gathering. I honestly believe that when my generation reaches old age, you will find us in retirmement homes still playing. We’ll be squinting through our reading glasses at our cards, grumbling about being mana screwed, and staying up way past our bedtimes. We Gen Xers live to have fun, and to indulge our imaginations, which is just what this game provides.