I may not have the language for this one perfectly right for this one but i will explain my meanings.
TLDR SYNOPSIS:
There are more than just the mainstream games available ad if you look harder you may find a world of games that suits you and your needs that those games don't meet.
also
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-board-games-that-ruined-it-everyone/
The best way for me to discuss this is to explain how we got into gaming.
WE had a cupboard full of the traditional, or mainstream games, you know the games you can buy at target, and KMart, pictionary, scattergories, monopoly, scrabble. And we played them very occasionally. We even had a CSI game in our cupboard that we had enjoyed the novelty of but stopped playing some time back. It just never seemed like something we'd get into heavily, i personally can't ever remember how to play chess much to my husbands chagrin.
Fact is all of those traditional ones can be ad often are by default, monotonous and not particularly fun.
And yet i recognized the education value of games, and i loved the idea o the family interaction time that didn't involve something that needed plugging in or recharging.
We had played and enjoyed a game with a frined of our called Talisman which was a new kind of game for us, fantasy adventure figurines etc. we even went and bought the modern version of it which we didn't like as much do to the completely PvP (player versus player) nature of it, i much prefer co-op games or PvE (player versus environment).
But we played it occasionally, it ws a long running game also which put us off it. Very quickly we discovered that it's a roll ad move with no particular goal to it other than to WIN, and like monopoly, it had limited interest for us, for a game that can run from two to four hours, i found myself becoming decidedly bored. I don't actually gt bored easily but i believe that when playing a game ALL attention should be on the game, doing anything else is rude to the people playing, and really there was nothing going into the brain when i played this game for more than half an hour.
Needless to say this was a disappointing purchase for us and the games thing went on the back burner again.
I acquired more traditional or mainstream games to play with the girls, hungry hippos, Creationary (this one is awesome), and Uno. Which they enjoy absolutely.
Whilst on a holiday one year we were in a bookstore that had some specialist game sin it, amongst them a Lord of the rings game and a 'Game of Thrones Game' as a fan of both of these my husband decided we ought to have them, we took them back to our hotel and to our disappointment the Game of Thrones one was a three + player game, and Lord of the rings was...OMG so hard to win with only 2, in fact we never have.
Shelved.
My husband really did enjoy Game of Thrones though so when we could get someone to play we played i, it's not really my kind of game as it's area control and completely adversarial. So i went looking for something that might interest me, these games certainly implied that there were 'other' games out there that i might like, and the co-op nature of Lord of the Rings said to me that there was certainly that mechanic out there on the market as well. So i looked.
I found Arkham Horror.
from there it was all uphill, i'd say down hill but to be honest it was fun, easy, and a wonderful new thing for us and downhill sounds do negative.
Arkham was big, complex, co-op hard to win but not impossible and there was quite the community around it on the internet.
From there we found Table Top, the youtube channel for Dicetower and www.boardgamegeek.com
And our local gaming group and it became a hobby that exploded for us, one that has taught our girls a lot already, taught us a lot brought us back together as a couple with a common interest, brought friends closer and helped us make new friends and become a large positive feature on out lives.
So how was this journey in any way a discussion on traditional or mainstream games versus designer or specialty games?
It comes down to being aware of what is out there, everyone knows about Monpoloy but what about Pandemic? And if you dislike party games like Pictionary and Taboo, that is not the limit of the gaming world, there's so much more if you look further.
On that note the traditional games are perfectly fine, i really quite enjoy taboo myself.
The reason i haven't gone into some of this more deeply is that other have done exactly that.
Here's is an article i found very interesting
http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-board-games-that-ruined-it-everyone/
No comments:
Post a Comment