Oh, hello. I didn’t see you there. Thank you for perusing our website!
What got us into Games? Why, I’m glad you asked. It all started many years ago… Back in the year 2009, during freshman year at Rutgers University. I decided to check out the information fair, you know, to see what sort of clubs and events might interest me. There was a table set up with something I had never seen before. Some sort of weird board game? Now, I had played the “Usual Games” such as Monopoly or Risk. Games that your family has and only busts out to make you remember that you hate playing games because they are five to twelve hours of mind-numbing monotony with people you can’t immediately cut out of your life even though you KNOW they’re cheating. There’s no way you still have so much money when you landed on my Boardwalk with hotels; I know you’re swiping from the bank! ARGH!
Anyway, this table was unlike anything I had seen before. Some kind of cooperative zombie strategy game? You can move in any direction, not just clockwise around Free Parking to pass go, prolonging the inevitable table flip? What do you mean different characters can have different abilities. What do you mean that the board is different every time?! I have to check this out.
And this my friends is how I joined the tabletop and strategy games club during my first semester of college. I was introduced to the modern strategy genre of games through Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Apocalypse board game. The club met once a week, and I was always ready to join this game, to learn the ins and outs, to master the possible strategies of a Hero character, to help interpret how the cards worked or the ranged weapons fired. And then the club told me that they had an “Adopt a Board Game” program, where you could put a few dollars down and reserve any game from the collection. This also allowed the adopter to bring the chosen game home, to the dorm room or family household, during weekends or vacation weeks like Thanksgiving break. This is how I introduced my family to this game, and we still have memorable stories from the first weekends I taught them. My grandmother standing her ground and blasting a bunch of the zombie hordes with a shotgun card (and a few lucky dice rolls) while my father rushed in blind, swinging bare-handed at a small group of the undead… only to end up as their meal. I would delight in reenacting the game’s “story” as if it were a terrible B-rated Horror movie that no one had seen. Eventually, I paid the Club the remaining shelf price of a used copy of this game and was able to keep it permanently. This is the copy we still have and play to this day… 12 years later.
Little did I know that this adventure would open a whole new world to me. Most friends I have talked to regarding their first steps into boardgaming have mentioned one of a few “Gateway Games” that they first played. These are usually simple to learn, engaging, but offer player freedom and interaction, such as Catan or Carcassonne. I started with a more unique intro game, but followed it up with these games to get a better understanding of what was out there. There were so many different game themes, different playstyles and strategies, and I wanted to get to know them all.
Fast forward a handful of years. My girlfriend (now wife) and I moved out to Pittsburgh, PA so she could take a one year accelerated Masters program in Library Science. Which is all well and good, but I wasn’t going to school for anything now, and outside of a few jobs to pay rent, what was I supposed to do? Well, as luck would have it, we moved into the same neighborhood as a childhood friend of mine, and her group of local friends were all very into tabletop gaming. They had weekly scheduled, open house style game nights. Sometimes, the owners of the meetup spot wouldn’t even be home from work yet, and two or three tables would be set up with people playing a variety of games. Justine and I only had one car at the time, so when she had to head into the city for class, she would drop me off at our friends home, gaming central, and I would spend hours learning many new games. Space games. Farming games. Card games. Dice games. Real Time games. Area control games. You name it, and someone in the group had something that fit. And here I was, a fresh face, never seen anything before. They taught me everything I could hope for. Some would say, while Justine got her Master in Library Science, I got mine in Tabletop Games. And I should hope so!
One thing I would do in my down time was read rulebooks. I would pour over them, read the semantics, how does this work, when does it work, and why? What was the intent of the designer in making this card? How does it fit the theme that you can fly space ships, but only on a two dimensional plane? What makes this fun? To the point where now, I am pretty good at opening a new game and interpreting a rulebook fairly quickly. I may need to set the game up, or run through a few turns against myself to figure out specifics, but if I have the time and space, I can learn most games well enough to teach them.
Since leaving PA and moving to NH, our personal game collection has grown pretty significantly. And so has our board game influence on friends and family! I have worked with a handful of libraries to start their own strategy game clubs and run some weekly gaming events. We’ve gotten more friends into gaming, so now they buy games that interest them (and we can lend copies when we visit each other). Now, I am putting together my own collection of resources and reviews, so I can refer to them myself, or share them with others! Hopefully, you’ll find something that interests you here… Or if you’re looking for something specific, just contact us and we will do our best to learn your game issue, and lead you through it!
Thanks, and may your dice always be lucky.
-Alex Fafara