Dice. Paper. Pen. Imagination.

While rooting around inside some boxes in his garage a few days ago, Lincoln found his Traveller books. He's owned them for nearly 30 years. Somehow, from high school to the Air Force to the private sector, from England to Mississippi, Turkey, Las Vegas, Portland, and about a dozen different houses and apartments around the Puget Sound, he's managed to keep these books. It was one of his favorite games when he was in high school. To be perfectly honest, he hasn't played a game since then, yet he just can't let the books get away from him. He had a lot of fun playing this game, and it's still fun even without the game play. That's why he's kept them around all these years. Ready why here.

While rooting around inside some boxes in his garage a few days ago, Lincoln found his Traveller books. He's owned them for nearly 30 years. Somehow, from high school to the Air Force to the private sector, from England to Mississippi, Turkey, Las Vegas, Portland, and about a dozen different houses and apartments around the Puget Sound, he's managed to keep these books. It was one of his favorite games when he was in high school. To be perfectly honest, he hasn't played a game since then, yet he just can't let the books get away from him. He had a lot of fun playing this game, and it's still fun even without the game play. That's why he's kept them around all these years. Ready why here.

Karamari Damacy

Lincoln isn't much of a video gamer. Never has been. His dad bought a Pong game back in the '70s. He played it, but it was his friends who always won. It's been that way for 35 years. Still, there are some games he gets addicted to. Games so simple yet involving that he keeps coming back to them over and over again. About 5 years ago, Voltaire Stax introduced him to one of those games: Katamari Damacy.

In the game, you are the Prince of All Cosmos, which would be pretty sweet if not the for the fact that your father is the King of All Cosmos. One night he swept all the stars and planets out of the sky, and now it's your job to roll up enough loose stuff on Earth to replace them. Your tool? A katamari, a very sticky ball. You roll it around and it picks up stuff. As you collect stuff, your katamari gets bigger, and you can pick up even larger stuff. You can go from picking up stuff from tacks and dice to shoes, cats, people, cars, building, islands, and even whole counties. Find out how something so simple can be so gosh-darned fun and involving here.

The World Is Not Enough.

We really still don't have much notion of what makes one board game a perennial hit and what sends another to the depths of forgotten obscurity. What's more, even people who design and sell board games for a living often don't know. Parker Brothers, for instance, famously turned down Monopoly on first look, citing it as being too complicated and having “too many rules” to be interesting. It was only after Charles Darrow, the creator of this version of the game, started selling every copy he could make, that they had a second look, and the rest is history.

I maintain that one important aspect of a game is that it should be fun to play, even if you lose, and lose big, and lose constantly.  Read more...

Lincoln and I are of the generation in between the Baby Boomers and Generation X, which means several things.

First and foremost, it means that our generation doesn't really have a name to call ourselves. We're not old enough to have that annoying hippie disdain for Cheap Trick; neither are we so modern that we can look on them with irony. We just think they're good.

But I digress. Another era we straddle is the time between board games and the advent of the video game. I can remember when every house had, usually in the hall closet, or in the rec room if you were lucky enough to have one, a stack of games, usually received as Christmas or birthday gifts. Read more.