There's little doubt in my mind that I am a lover of games. There should be little doubt in your mind as well if you've read many of my other blog posts. Some of you readers wonder perhaps how a grown man could be so childish: to answer that I have to say it takes considerable practice on my part but I manage to do it.
Of all the game mechanics that are out there one of the most innovative has come out the last five years or so: the deck-building mechanic. Now building a deck has long been the staple of collectible card games. It's always something that takes place outside the game though and the options are only limited by your selection of cards on hand. Somebody that has more or better cards are naturally going to have considerably more options and, if practiced, will be able to dominate the game due to resources outside the game itself. Magic the Gathering is the most obvious culprit of these sorts of games. People scramble for the best cards which typically fall in the uncommon and rare levels and only those with the ability to obtain said cards will naturally be able to play them. This isn't to say having access to those cards instantly make you unbeatable however. Literacy in game mechanics is just as (or more) important than actually having those cards, but having the harder to find more desirable cards can certainly up the odds of winning. But once you've selected the cards and built your deck that aspect of the game is gone.
The deck building game uses the idea of building the deck as a primary driving mechanic for the game itself. The most obvious example is the card game Dominion. In Dominion everybody starts with the same group of cards in individual decks. Each player obtains cards from a central pool by either purchasing them with coin cards from their decks (most common) or through action cards from their decks (less common). Every player has an action, in which they can play a card, and a market, in which they can buy a card from the central pool, as part of their turn. Action cards will add more actions, give you extra coins, give you another buy, or let you draw cards among a few other things. Dominion doesn't have a tremendous amount of player interaction in the base set, but the multiple expansions that have been released has added more "attack" cards to the game. The primary mechanic for Dominion, which is one of my favorite mechanics, is the deck building: purchasing cards from the pool and adding them to your deck (which undergoes a lot of reshuffling as the game progresses).
Dominion was one of the first games to utilize this mechanic, but there are a tremendous amount of variety out there for somebody wanting to explore the idea of deck building. Ascension is simpler in scope, but has a feel more like Magic the Gathering over all. Like Dominion players start with identical individualized decks but unlike Dominion they are actually combating a central enemy and the victory points are not cards that clutter your deck [victory points are cards in Dominion, part of the game is creating a combo engine that will allow you to purchase more expensive victory point cards] but instead exist outside it in the form of tokens. The pool of cards in Ascension is limited and ever changing, but the concept is the same: add cards from the core pool to your deck by using the in-game currency and actions.
But there are others, oh so many others. Thunderstone took the deck builder and added the concept of explorers exploring dungeons. RuneAge has each players with a private pool of cards as well as a very limited central pool, building armies to fight each other and against a scenario deck (which is clever). There's deck building games with horror themes (Resident Evil, Eaten By Zombies) sci-fi themes (Star Trek, Core Worlds) super hero themes (both a Marvel and DC have licensed games with heavy deck building mechanics as well as several unlicensed games) and so on, and so on. There are also a games that have incorporated deck building as one of several mechanics to help give the game depth (the best example is Mage Knight: the Board Game). Not to mention games that have taken the concept and applied it to other things: Puzzle Strike uses poker style chips and Quarriors uses the same mechanic with dice.
Long story short there's a smorgassboard of deck building games out there for a guy like me that has yet to get enough of that particular mechanic.
Say hello to my little friend.
I've been gone far too long.
I suppose silence is necessary at times. I have a lot to talk about, perhaps not a lot to actually say though. I decided to take a month off for November because... well, I'm not sure why. The vitriol of the elections were part of it. The rest? Well it will wait.
I want to talk about my friend Brian. That's what the point of the blog is today. Brian was 22, in 2 months he would have been 23. He was quiet, mirthful and observant, you could forget he was there if he wanted you to. He often had a bemused smirk on his face. Never arrogant, but knowing as if he knew a joke and knew that you'd soon get it too. He loved video games, particularly racing games and had an appreciation of cars that part of me wishes I could have shared. Most of all he had a quiet mirthful sense of humor. There was a twinkle in his eye that made most folks like him.
He also had cystic fibrosis. For those of you unaware, it's a genetic disease in which the body produces a thick viscous mucus that fills the lungs and effects the digestive tract of those who have it. These folks tend to be pretty small, slight even, but worse of all they have a horrible cough that not only sounds painful, but looks painful. The symptoms get worse through out life and many folks with the disease don't live past their mid-twenties. Sadly this was something Brian had to deal with.
He didn't let it define him though. He was content to live his life, and enjoy it. I think that's what the smirk was. He was enjoying life, despite the pain he endured, and that is beautiful. Anybody who can take something that would bring another person down and say "Nope, this isn't gonna define who I am!" deserves respect.
I first met Brian working at Stewart's Marketplace. When I started in September of 2008 Brian had been there for about nine months. He was quiet, worked quickly and never gave up the pace for idle chatter. He let me do that. Perhaps that's why I took such a liking to him, he let me ramble on and on and would quietly interject, clearing his throat often as he did.
He had a certain fearlessness about him as well. The two tiered, four-wheeled carts that we used to stack freight on were not sturdy devices. In fact I tested their stability many times with either product or ill-advised placement of my hand. There was an outer bar on either side and three bars in the middle (as well as cross bars for bracing) so the carts didn't have a single flat surface. This didn't stop Brian from hopping on them regularly to stack product on the top shelf. I'd chastise him for it. He would give me that's knowing smirk and a little shrug. Not to dismiss my concern, but instead perhaps to indicate that I just didn't get it.
It was about a year and a half later that Brian had to quit. His cystic fibrosis had got the better of him, and the physicality of the work didn't permit him to continue. Particularly at the pace he set himself. He quit, but I still saw him fairly often at the store and made sure to get his number to keep in touch.
It was Halloween of 2009 that I introduced Brian to D&D (now we play Pathfinder, but it's very similar to D&D). I ran a game for Halloween. A one-shot (that lasted two game sessions) and invited Brian as the 4th player.
He was baffled. For those that don't know, we don't dress up, it is a game of pretend, but it's ruled by dice, number-crunching and a heavy dose of imagination. One person acts as the narrator essentially, as well as referee and rules-judge and playing all the incidental parts in the story. The rest of the players are the main characters. It's very much like cooperative story-telling, and even published adventures will be very different from group to group. My group liked to role-play. They wouldn't act out anything, but funny voices and strange character descriptions rule the day and Brian was... well I think he thought we were crazy.
He came back to finish up though. I actually talked to him about it a few days afterward. I apologized, because quite honestly it probably wasn't the best introduction. I was a very poor teacher at this point. He said it was ok, it wasn't what he expected but he had fun and he had a blast laughing at us. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, he was there a couple weeks later when we finished the short adventure.
The next summer I ran a genuine intro game: two new guys who'd never played, as well as my friend Sandman and our mutual friend Sims (they both played in the Halloween game). This was a dungeon crawl, and was a little more what Brian anticipated. This time there were maps and miniatures as well as a little more grounding in rules. We played through the summer and by the end all three had a pretty good idea of what the game was. The two new young men moved back to college, and I told Brian he had a spot in the next campaign I ran if he wanted it. He did.
For the last two years Brian has played in my campaign. In that time everybody at the "table" has come to like Brian. He really got into the game, even playing the perfect character for his own personal demeanor: a sneaky agile rogue that hides in the shadows. He took notes, and participated in every game he came to with good ideas and suggestions, even getting into the role-playing some. He became one of us. He was other things as well to his friends outside us gamers and to his family of course. But he fit with our group and we claimed him with adamant pride.
Brian's going to be missed. There's a hole where he is in all our hearts. There's a hole at the gaming table that can never be filled. That makes two now. I'm not sure I ever want to fill those holes at my gaming table. I can never replace the friends outside of it, and I'll never try to replace the friends inside of it.
For those of you wondering at the irreverent title of this blog: I am, as most of my readers know, a very large man, both wide and tall. Brian was small. Very small. I would have him walk behind me when we both worked at the store and we'd approach our co-workers. I'd state loudly, imitating Al Pacino, "Say 'allo to my lidl' friend!" Then step aside. Brian would smirk and wave. I would guffaw loudly at this while whoever we did it too either looked on bewildered or simply shook their heads chuckling. He must have found the humor in it, I don't think he'd ever go along with it otherwise.
So say hello to my little friend. Brian was somebody I could admire. I did admire, and do admire. I feel sad for all of us that lost him. I feel sad for those of you who will never get to meet him.
