Wednesday 6 July 2011

Play:// With Myself

I can still remember the joy of playing with myself as a young boy.

Sorry I really couldn't help myself. I am of course talking about solitaire gaming, solo gaming, whatever you wish to call it. See whilst this is a rather new obsession for me, I was always interested in gaming as a child but it kind of morphed into my interest in computer and video games, and it's only now that I'm rediscovering the joy of fondling cardboard.

Board games were for a long time, something my family did at Christmas when we'd run out of other things to play, and had nothing left to argue about. I loved playing them, the rest of my family were not so keen. Still I remember playing a lot of Monopoly (with a lot of bad rules) and I still have my much loved 'Deluxe' edition along with my copy of Scrabble that I never did seem to convince my family to play. I loved playing board games, and I'd play pretty much any board game with anyone who asked. I always wanted games as Christmas presents but they were never played as much as I would like as my family and friends simply were not interested most of the time. So apart from looking longingly at those ridiculously expensive wooden monopoly sets, my interest in board games died for the first time.



It was the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks which rekindled my interest in gaming. I loved the idea of role playing games, and once again finding myself in the position of wanting to play them and having nobody to play them with, gamebooks provided me with the next best thing. I still read RPG books and at the time there was a little hobby store in my home town and it was browsing here that I came across a board game I could play by myself...



That game was Curse of the Mummy's Tomb by Games Workshop. It really wasn't a great game but I played that thing until the stupid cardboard pyramid was practically falling apart. I wish I still had it but I think it made it's way to a charity shop and is probably sitting on ebay right now for some ridiculously inflated price. I don't think it was long after this that I got an Amiga 500 and once again board games became a distant memory.

Until now that is...and it just happens that my reintroduction was via another solitaire game, Zombie in My Pocket. It didn't take me long to find out there are now loads of options for solitaire gaming, and not much longer to realise that I still really enjoy playing solitaire games. I'm probably going to write a post soon going into more detail about why I play and love solitaire games but I just wanted to post this little introduction because I think it's a theme that will appear regularly here. I have more options for playing board games with other people now, hell I'm raising a couple of future opponents, but like a good book or film I really enjoy spending a few hours absorbed in a game by myself so I'll be sharing some of my reviews and thoughts on the topic here.

Try it out. It really won't make you go blind.

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