Game On

I recently played a game I really liked called Cards Against Humanity. The game involves completing sentences or answering questions on black cards with the content on white cards. Typically, the content is profane or obscene. It's a lot of laughs. You can even write your own cards. Playing a game like that makes for a great deal of catharsis after a time when things have all gone to crap, which, as I've written here before, they have for me. So I'll use the game as a jumping off point to talk about my own history with gaming. This will focus on my history with non-roleplaying games. Anything where you're doing interactive storytelling, in my experience, while fun in theory, is usually a demoralizing argument in practice. Card/board games, on the other hand, have nearly always gone well for me, with the notable exception of Risk, which I'll touch on later.

My earliest experience with games was probably with the board kind. Mostly, I played Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit with my family. I was of middling skill with the former and rather dominant at the latter. In the days before the Internet, or, at any rate, before Arkansas saw much of the Internet, these were pleasant ways to while away the hours. It wasn't until I got to college that I was introduced to card games. Although my mother had successfully taught me poker as a tween, your traditional deck of cards was not my real entrance into things. That was a game called Magic: The Gathering, which had a complexity and versatility the likes of which I had never seen. Quickly, I learned my favorite colors were red and white and that I favored simple strategy based on direct attack and healing myself. From there, I was exposed to the comedic antics of Munchkin and the intellectually stimulating fun of Apples To Apples. Only Risk has proven entirely inaccessible to me, as I have no skill whatsoever for the game and it forces me to just slowly bleed to death.

It took me a while to figure out what exactly it was about playing Cards Against Humanity that inspired me to write about it and card/board games in general. The conclusion I've come to is that it made me realize I has thrown the baby out with the bath water. When I abandoned roleplaying games, I made what I continue to believe was a good decision, but there wasn't ever a real reason for me to abandon everything in the game store. Video games are too complex, roleplaying games too argumentative, but card/board games did me no wrong. With that in mind, perhaps Cards Against Humanity can be something of a springboard to get me back into these type of games. Now, I've not got many people to play with, so that'll be an issue, but it's nice to have something to be excited about beyond my usual smoking and cooking interests.

-Frank