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Fun and Games
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” they say. Well, I don’t want to be dull. So I play a variety of games. I love all sorts of games, whether sports, board games, word games and puzzles, cards, miniatures, or role-playing. This page lists some of the games I enjoy the most.
Sports
I’ve never been very skilled at sports, but I enjoy playing and watching some of them. As my sons get older and more interested in sports, so do I (on both counts). |
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During the fall and winter, I enjoy watching NFL football. I’m the sort of fan who watches the games as regularly as possible during the season and really gets into a good game, but doesn’t memorize rosters and statistics. I typically don’t follow team news closely during the off season unless major roster or leadership changes seem to be in the works.
 I spent my grade school years in southeast Texas as an Oilers fan, and followed the team—both figuratively and literally—to Tennessee (we moved to Tennessee the year they became the Titans). I’ve had the good fortune to attend two Titans games, one at the Coliseum in Nashville and one road game against the Atlanta Falcons.
 Growing up Texan, I always had a degree of interest in the Dallas Cowboys (and how fondly I remember the old Governor’s Bowl matchups), an interest that blossomed more after I moved to north Texas in junior high and to the DFW metroplex as a Ph.D. student. Thanks to the generosity of one of our elders at Preston Road Church of Christ, I had the pleasure of seeing the Dallas Cowboys narrowly defeat Philadelphia on a Monday night in Texas Stadium.
 Since moving to southern California, I’ve started paying more attention to the San Diego Chargers. I must admit that my affection for the Chargers doesn’t come close to my feelings for the Titans and Cowboys, but it’s slowly growing. I need a local team, since I get little opportunity to see the Titans’ and Cowboys’ televised games any more, and I just can’t get excited about Oakland or San Francisco.
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I enjoy playing football, baseball, basketball, and soccer casually, just having catch or shooting hoops, especially with my sons. I don’t play competitively—or skillfully. But I do have fun. I personally don’t find baseball, basketball, or soccer to be particularly engaging spectator sports, though I’m trying to watch them more and more with my boys since they are interested in these games. Nathan is about to start his third season of AYSO … and there's an outside chance that I may need to be his team's coach, if the regional director can't find enough better-qualified volunteers. |
Customizable/Collectible/Trading Card Games
Back in 1993, a new kind of card game hit the market: the customizable card game. Customizable card games don’t have fixed decks like most card games do. Instead, they feature a (large, usually) pool of cards from which individual players construct their own customized decks. Thus, alongside of the game engine and the random draw of cards from the deck, the very composition of the deck itself becomes a part of the game strategy. |
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At the present time, my favorite tournament game is Anachronism by TriKing Games. It's not exactly a collectible card game, but you do purchase cards in individual packs and customize your deck to taste. Anachronism combines the customizable aspect with a miniatures game aspect, as you move your warrior around in a 4x4 grid. Basically, it's gladiatorial combat between historical, quasi-historical, or literary figures, using ideas and equipment from throughout world history to support your warrior against the opponent. Last warrior standing wins. I actively play and support this game; you can learn more by visiting my Anachronism blog and web site, Dystemporalia. |
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For a long time, my favorite game hobby was the Star Trek Customizable Card Game (2nd ed.) published by Decipher. I play with a local group in Ventura, and sometimes travel to play with the San Diego group (especially for big events like the territorial championships). I used to maintain a big web site for the game and was an "Ambassador" and "Product Champion" for a while. I was also involved behind-the-scenes in some playtesting at certain points. However, the lack of a strong local play group has dulled my interest, and I haven't kept up with the last several sets. It's still a great game, though. |
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I collected the Redemption card game pretty diligently through the first three sets (first edition limited/unlimited and the first two expansions, The Prophets and The Women), then lost interest. I recently showed my son Nathan the game, and his enthusiasm for it has rekindled my own a bit. The gameplay is really pretty simple, though the game has gained a little strategic depth and a couple of new card types since the first edition. When I bother to think about it, I can see some conceptual flaws in the game’s core metaphor, and on several specific cards I have some sharp exegetical disagreements with the game designers (especially the characterization of certain biblical characters, Esau for example, as evil)—but usually I just kick back and give the exegesis a rest, happy to be playing a card game with a biblical theme that interests my son. |
Role-Playing Games
Role-playing games can be thought of as a kind of cooperative storytelling, or as sets of rules for disciplined games of mental “make-believe.” Generally, one participant serves as a kind of narrator for the story, describing a fictional world and various events that take place there. Each of the other participants controls the actions of one of the main characters in the story, using (usually) numerical statistics to determine the characters’ capabilities and die rolls to determine the outcome of various actions.
[Kolya said,] “... and finally, another thing, there’s a slanderous rumor going around about me, that I played robbers with the preparatoryclass last week. That I played with them is actually true, but that I played for myself, for my own pleasure, is decidedly slander. ...”
“And even if you did play for your own pleasure, what of it?”
“Well, even if I did ... But you don’t play hobbyhorse, do you?”
“You should reason like this,” Alyosha smiled. “Adults, for instance, go to the theater, and in the theater, too, all sorts of heroic adventures are acted out, sometimes also with robbers and battles—and isn’t that the same thing, in its own way, of course? And a game of war among youngsters during a period of recreation, or a game of robbers—that, too, is a sort of nascent art, an emerging need for art in a young soul, and these games are sometimes even better conceived than theater performances, with the only difference that people go to the theater to look at the actors, and here young people are themselves the actors. But it’s only natural.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 4.10.4
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The Star Trek Role-Playing Game published by Decipher allows narrators and players to create their own Star Trek “series” of adventures set in any of the major Star Trek eras (including the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th centuries). Players can take on the roles of starship captains, science officers, and so on and explore the final frontier in an entirely new way. For a short time, I played via video iChat in a campaign. My character, Davarichen th’Raazi, was an Andorian tactical officer stationed on the U.S.S. Excalibur in the time between the classic-era movies and The Next Generation. However, schedule conflicts forced me to drop this activity. |
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As a pre-teen I discovered the fantasy role-playing adventures of Dungeons & Dragons, and after a long time away from the game have picked up the new 3.5 edition built on the d20 system engine. d20 is an elegant system: every action you want your character to take is resolved by rolling one twenty-sided die and adding appropriate modifiers; if your roll equals or exceeds the “difficulty class” number for that action, your character succeeds.
I use the d20 system as the rules framework for the “castle game” I play with Nathan— essentially a one-player D&D campaign set in the world of Fahrvonhier, based on his Imaginext toys and with a strong dose of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in the background (unlike Eustace Scrubbs, I have read the right sorts of books). I also run a D&D 3.5 campaign set in Ptolus for several of my adult friends whom I know from our church.
I also enjoy playing D&D Miniatures skirmishes, both casually with Nathan and competitively when I get the chance.
You can learn more about this hobby by reading my d20 blog, Icosahedrophilia. |
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Testament: Role-Playing in the Biblical Era by Scott Bennie, published by Green Ronin, was the d20 supplement that got me interested in role-playing again after almost twenty years away from the hobby. Utilizing the d20 system, Testament is literally “Bible D&D,” as strange as that might sound. This unlikely confluence of my professional life and my gaming hobby was too intriguing to pass up. Testament presents a rules structure for role-playing adventures in the biblical (read: Old Testament) era. It is not an attempt at historical reconstruction or religious instruction, but is rather a fantasy game, so you have to stretch a bit to get into it. For example, all ancient Near Eastern religions are treated as equally “real” ontologically, psalmists’ psalms have miraculous powers, and so on. I haven’t actually had much chance to play using these rules; a couple of play-by-email campaigns fizzled, and I had to cancel my trip to GenCon 2004 where I was scheduled to run a Testament adventure. Even so, I like the setting enough to write for Targum, an e-zine dedicated to games with ancient world settings, and to offer several web resources at Icosahedrophilia. |
Chess Variants
In truth, I’m really not that great a chess player. I’m not very good at thinking more than a few moves ahead. Maybe that’s why I like these chess variants so much—they introduce randomness, even chaos into the game, allowing me to keep up better. |
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Knightmare Chess is played with a regular chess set and a deck of cards (or two customized decks, depending on which variant you care to use). At first, all normal chess rules apply, except that on your turn you may play one of the cards from your hand. The cards might do almost anything, from creating impassable walls on the chessboard to turning your pieces into bombs, from changing the way pieces move to rotating the entire board 90 degrees (freaking out the pawns who now have to switch directions), from complete disorder to unimaginable chaos. Knightmare Chess adds a whole new level of unpredictability and strategic planning to a classic game. There is also a second set, Knightmare Chess 2, which adds even more chaos to the chessboard. |
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I don’t like Tile Chess as much as Knightmare Chess, but it is a fun game. In Tile Chess, there is no board; or, rather, the board is formed “virtually” and is continually expanding by the placement and movement of the pieces. Tile chess is also a multiplayer game, with up to six players competing at once. |
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Chess 4 extends the chess board by adding two rows of eight squares on each of the four sides of the chessboard, creating a plus-shaped configuration. This allows for four sets of chess pieces—adding gold and silver to the traditional black and white—to compete on the same field. Playing chess against three opponents at once is a lot different than playing against one opponent! |
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Proteus is played on a standard chess board, but each player controls a set of eight dice instead of the standard sixteen chess pieces. Each turn, you move one of your dice in accordance with the standard way of moving the piece shown on the top face of the die, and then you may rotate one of your other dice, which changes which piece it is! Proteus also adds a new piece: the pyramid, which can neither move nor be captured. Since your opponent’s pieces are constantly “morphing” into new pieces, your best-layed plans can easily come apart at the seams. |
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Fluxx begins with two simple rules: on your turn, you draw one card and play one card. That’s it. All the other rules that might be needed are generated during gameplay by the cards themselves. Whatever you’re supposed to do with a particular card is printed on the card. In Fluxx, some of the cards change the rules, so the game is ever-changing. For example, a card might introduce the rule “on your turn, draw two cards,” superseding the basic rule “draw one card.” Fluxx is an ingenious, nutty game (from Looney Labs, of course!) that never plays out the same way twice. |
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In a game of Chrononauts, each player takes on the “role” of a time-traveler trying to “get home” to his or her own particular version of reality. One set of cards defines a timeline covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Two other small sets of cards define each player’s objectives (which are kept secret from the other players). The largest stack of cards allows each player, in turn, to manipulate the timeline in various ways that bring it closer to matching that player’s secret goal. Once you get the hang of it, the game plays relatively quickly and is a blast. |
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Set is a fast-paced game of visual perception that quickly became a family favorite when we discovered it. Players try to pick out sets of cards (following certain strictly described criteria) from a grid of cards dealt out on the table. Sometimes the sets jump out at you—and sometimes they don’t. A simple, brilliant game. |
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Genius Rules is a commercial variant of Robert Abbott’s game Eleusis. In both games, a dealer lays down cards in a pattern governed by a “secret rule” that the players try to infer from the dealer’s clues (which are delivered only by the placement of the next card in the series). Abbott himself apparently does not like Genius Rules at all, but I have found it to be a fun puzzle game. Eleusis is played with a standard deck of cards and dealers make up the secret rule on the fly; Genius Rules uses a deck of rules that dealers follow and a deck of cards that depicts various “geniuses” (debatable) from world history. |
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Target is an award-winning rummy-type game where the necessary melds are defined by special cards drawn from a target deck. Cards come in four suits (there are also wild cards) and are numbered 0–9. The target cards (five are active at any one time) define various melds (such as “all odd” or “straight flush”) and their point values. Players race to collect the highest number of points. The game is great fun and incredibly well-balanced. |
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Carcassonne is a fun strategy game in which players take turn laying down tiles that eventually form a large landscape. Players score points by placing their "followers" on the tiles in various ways to indicate their status as knight, monk, farmer, or thief traveler (our own personal little substitution at home). Some of the expansions allow for builders, merchants, and so on. |
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Ark of the Covenant is, essentially, Carcassonne with a biblical flavor. If that line didn’t make any sense to you: in Ark of the Covenant, players take turns laying down tiles that bear illustrations of fields, cities, roads, temples, and so forth. Players score points by completing different types of terrain features and placing their “shepherd” and “prophet” tokens on the developing gameboard. The game is easy to learn and fun to play for all ages. |
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