We recently dug out the big box o’ board games here in Casa Del Brain Jar, separating out everything that we can rock with two players and working our way through them. I haven’t played board games regularly in about six or seven years—not since my primary board-gaming friends decamped for Melbourne for good—and I have a bad tendency towards playing other people’s games when I do.
Then we spent a week playing Zombies!!! and Killer Bunnies and my partner’s copy of the pirate-themed card game Splice, and my brain started poking at board games I might want to pick up soon. My partner started researching games and identifying those that looked interesting.
At the same time, I’ve been poking at new RPG systems for the first time since 2011. Getting familiar with the Blades in the Dark system so we can pick it up in place of our now-completed-after-nine-years Thursday Night Superhero Campaign. Kicking the tyres on a Shadowrun game I might run at some stage.
And it’s funny—for a few years, I didn’t really feel like a gamer. I played games every now and then, but I wasn’t really part of a gaming community in the same way I had been as a younger man. I didn’t get excited about new releases of games, didn’t go searching for new opportunities, and didn’t really gather to talk about them online or at conventions. The part of my brain that used to be all about gaming communities got subsumed by writing fiction, and there weren’t enough spoons to manage the gaming stuff on top.
One of my goals for 2019—often interrupted and hard to get back to—was trying to recapture that feeling of being part of a larger community. Putting my gamer hat back on, after years of being writing-focused.
It’s happening slowly, but it’s getting there.
