It was a really clickbaity title. See for yourself: How A Forgotten D&D Rule Shaped the Entire Old-School Gaming Culture. Wouldn’t you click that?! Alright, maybe it’s clickbait just for the freaks like me. Anyway, I clicked it, of course, and watched it with my eyes wide open. In just a few minutes, I teleported to the 70s and saw how people played RPG games back in the day. To put it simply, they were playing Diablo, while I was playing Divinity: Original Sin. They were playing quick-paced quests, while I was taking part in long epic stories that could be taken straight from G.R.R. Martin’s books.

Every D&D session began with descending into the dungeons. Every D&D session ended with leaving the dungeons. It was all about Experience Points, spending money on new items, and getting ready for the next quests. Sounds like Diablo, right? But there was a catch in this clickbaity and forgotten rule… 

On my way home from the office. We are again with Mark in the car, and again we are talking about the game, bit by bit, every detail gets discussed. It was very tight. Until the very end, everyone was in the game, everyone had a chance. Each of us made a mistake at some point, made a facepalm, and groaned that it was the wrong move, that they were mistaken, that they would lose, and that they wasted their turn. The factions in the game were excellent, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. The battle mechanism, revolutionary then, in 2016, today, in 2022, is still innovative. A mega clever idea to add crystals to battles to encourage conflict, mega cool terrain rules, and corresponding tactic cards, and a smart rule for a spherical planet … I was driving, and we could not stop buzzing.

Cry Havoc is a game that we created in 2015, nearly a decade ago. It is still one of the 5 best Area control games on the market. It’s good to play such an awesome game. It was good back then to test, improve, and live with it for literally months. It came out nicely. I am a proud daddy.

Driving home from work takes me, depending on traffic, 15 to 20 minutes. For more than half of this route, we were complaining about War of the Ring: The Card Game. We had just finished playing it, and we were airing our grievances. I was complaining about its randomness. Marek agreed that the cards were very situational—powerful in certain combinations, but useless in others. I was whining that the scaling was quite weird, and the variants for 2, 3, and 4 players all had many small different rules. And Marek dared to complain about the balance right after the first playthrough—said it was off, and that the Fellowship of the Ring felt much more powerful in a 3-player game.

I was turning into my street when Marek said he’d love to play it again. I said I couldn’t wait to play again as well.

So there was this one guy in the wargaming group who wrote a post that he’d already played Nevsky three times, and each play was boring, tedious, and he really didn’t like this game. Nevsky is one of my favorite board wargames, so I just smiled and repeated to myself: “De gustibus non est disputandum. To each their own. There’s beauty in variety.” I was surprised that this guy actually spent three sessions, each four hours long, on a game he didn’t even like. On the other hand, Nevsky isn’t the cheapest, so he probably wanted to be absolutely sure it wasn’t for him. I respect that.

But not even a month later, that same gamer, in the same group, was roasting the game called Almoravid. For all of you who don’t know what Almoravid is, I will explain—it’s Nevsky, but in Spain. The same genre, the same series, just a few changes in the rules. That’s when I started to wonder.

It’s been more than a decade since I’ve participated in a tournament. Though attending conventions is my job, I usually work at the Portal Games booth at those events and don’t have time to spend hours in competitions. Also, it probably doesn’t befit someone working in the industry to fight for main prizes with other competitors. At some point in my life, I stopped competing in wargaming. I didn’t join the fight for keys in Keyforge or road building in Catan. Tournaments are a thrill, a rush of adrenaline, but also a lot of frustration, when one of the competitors focuses too much on the prize and destroys the fun for everyone else, ignoring the rules of fair play. I haven’t experienced all of this in years.

Last weekend, after my decade-long break, I took part in a tournament. I was stressed out, of course! But I packed my Arkham Horror LCG cards and went to the small, local tournament organized in a board game pub in the city I live in.