Cardboard Chits

Lessons learned living in one’s head

a lot of people I know view art as a form of recreation. Be it painting, sculpture, interpretive dance or what have you, they view art as an oasis from their everyday life. I wish I could feel that way but I don’t. 

Art is something I am driven to do. Calling it a compulsion wouldn’t be far off.  Like everyone else, though, it is important I step away every once in a while to find my own oasis. I am a gamer and have been one all my life. 

As a child there were the usual suspects, Monopoly and Clue. I learned to shuffle a deck of playing cards at an early age and ran the chess club at my school. Nothing life changing. One day I was introduced to Gettysburg from Avalon Hill and, oh my, did that set me off. 

The next decade was a flurry of cardboard chits, unwieldy paper maps and countless lookup tables. I didn’t know at the time why complexity was so compelling. All I knew was that I could relive history and perhaps change it if only on a table and in the abstract. The minutiae of everything was what brought me in. The themes and lore of what I was simulating was what kept me. 

At some point, computers entered the picture and once again everything changed. Flashing lights, colors and buttons galore. I was smitten and easily seduced.  I pumped hundreds of quarters into arcade cabinets, bought my first console and in due time, my first computer. 

It was a good thing too because around that time it became necessary for me to find a job and go to work. I am eternally grateful that computers provided me an avenue for that as well. 

Over the years I never outgrew my love for gaming. If a book store had a tiny section devoted to dusty board games you would find me there even though I was fully aware there were few people in my life who would ever understand if I suggested opening a box full of pieces and dice and stuff. I never stopped keeping track of the latest trends in video games long after I admitted I no longer had the youthful skills to be able to enjoy them. 

Come the pandemic everything changed once again. My computer was full of mostly bad news and the games on it seemed empty and sterile. Things built more for distraction and profit rather than exploration. I needed something real to be my oasis. So, I returned to my first love, games in boxes. Tangible bits and bobs. Physical media.  Luckily for me there had been a minor renaissance in board games since the early nineties. Which brings us to today. 

This, being a very minor biography of a gamer, is an extremely poor history. It says I have background and it’s a bit deep.  I also might have an opinion or two at least when it comes to what we do in our spare time. More on that in the next installment.