A brief history of games and me
A new blog post by games enthusiast Danil Potemkin
When I was a kid, I played a lot of chess and card games (Durak was a popular one) with my parents and brothers and I even designed my first game at around 9 years old. At around the same time I remember visiting a wargames convention and being intrigued by the miniature wargames being played there. Then at secondary school I met a few kids who played tabletop wargames and fell in with that crowd.
Given my early history with tabletop games, it was probably inevitable that I would be into board games, but it certainly didn’t feel that way as I got into my late teens. I fell out of love with the hobby and became more interested in music and sport and it wasn’t until my early 30s that I rediscovered games.
Some time in 2014 a close friend came over one evening carrying a large bag of odd shaped and colourful boxes, so after dinner we cracked open a game or two along with another bottle of wine. Catan was one of the games we played that evening and it was just the right game to gently re-introduce me to the world of tabletop games. Sarah will probably talk more about ‘gateway’ games at some point in a future newsletter/blog.
It turned out that the board games market had changed hugely during my hiatus. Where once games were a choice of either miniature wargames (that I enjoyed more for the modelling and painting aspect) or mass market games like Monopoly and Risk, now there was a huge variety of new games to discover. New and exciting game mechanics, beautiful art and clean graphic design were now as important as how many copies a game would sell. Lords of Waterdeep, Roll for the Galaxy, Five Tribes, Forbidden Island were some of the early games I purchased and still enjoy playing.
Aside from regular regular game evenings with my wife (the two of us play two or three times a week) and gaming friends, I also discovered gaming meet-ups that allowed me to satisfy my craving for new and exciting games. London On Board was (and still is, although at time of writing all their events are currently online) a great way to meet people and play a few games.
As board games have become more popular, so have game designers become more diverse. It’s been interesting to see the increase in the variety of games being released over the last few years in particular. No longer the preserve of Sci-Fi and Fantasy fans, the hobby has expanded to include themes as diverse as birdwatching in Wingspan, making stained glass windows in Sagrada and satisfying your inner Jay Z in Rap Godz. And of course there are still plenty of very good fantasy and sci-fi games on the market to suit the tastes of fans of those genres (the brilliant Star Wars: Rebellion and Clank! are just two examples).
I’m now a parent to two budding gamers (3 and 6 years old) and am thoroughly enjoying introducing them to the hobby. I hope that in years to come they can increasingly join my wife and I in playing the games we most enjoy.