My beloved hobby!
Boardgaming is a ton of work. I look at any of these free weekends, and oh my God, I’ve been busy all day long.
Let’s discuss last weekend. It all began with the new Arkham Horror expansion that I got. The suitcase, where I keep all my cards said enough, no space dude, you need to come up with a new solution.
So I came. I took all cards from expansions I already finished and moved them to separate boxes – lucky enough, I had these „Return to…” boxes that FFG has in offer for crazy dudes like me.
It went smoothly, and I looked at my collection with pride. That was time spent well. Then I decided to move all cards from all other campaigns to a new place and keep in the suitcase only the one expansion I am playing at the moment, along with tokens, rulebooks, and other stuff, and by stuff I mean all these custom bits I hide in the box.
I was in a pretty awesome mood already, so when I finished moving all the cards to a new place, I put on my desk all cards for my characters and looked at the deckbuilding options I was postponing it for some time already. This Saturday seemed like a perfect time for that. So I built a brand new deck for one character and then brand new deck for the other one.
Fun time.
Then some sleeving. Then reading rules for the new expansion. OMG, this new scenario – exciting stuff. I was about to play it, but it was a late-night already. Well, it turned out I spent the whole day preparing.
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As with every hobby, board gaming is about everything except the actual hobby – that is, playing the game. We spend countless hours painting minis, we spend nights building new decks, we customize our games, and we spend day and night on BGG reading about the hobby.
The percentage of time we spend on actual gaming versus the time we spend on the hobby is not in favor for game time.
My wife Merry makes fun of me when I spent all weekends preparing for playing the game. And I guess, many of you are just like me. We smile and we have one honest response:
„Didn’t play the game. Had a blast anyway.”
I strongly believe that good board game is the one that tells a good story. You play it and suddenly you are sucked into it, you feel chills on the skin. Emotions grow. In a moment you defend castle. You hear roar of warriors. You smell boiling oil. You are into it.
That's how I design my games. I always want to tell a good story. I want players to be into it. As deep as possible.
I have similar feelings after a whole day of moving minis from one place to another, preparing army sheet or inventing house rules. Even if we don’t play at the end, and the army sheet and my new super exciting rules will go to the drawer, I still had a great time.