Familiarity with Board Games

by Chris McGinty of AccordingToWhim.com

A few years ago, I was part of a small group. Almost every Sunday, two or more of us would get together

and play board games. During this time, we had a decent collection of games available allowing for variety, but it was small enough that we played many of the titles with a high frequency.

The result of this was that we all became familiar with the rules, the strategy, and sometimes the obscure inter-workings of mechanic interactions. Some of the titles we enjoyed so much that any of us could have taught the games if we brought in a new player. When the collection would gain a new title, if we enjoyed the game, it wouldn’t take long for us to reach a similar level of familiarity.

Then once a month we started attending a local event in Plano, Texas called The Dallas Games Marathon. The DGM had a library of nearly 1,000 games that you could play on site as part of your price of admission or membership. Our group had a guideline for playing at the DGM, which was that we should play games that we couldn’t normally play on our weekly Sunday game night.

On top of this, we started attending the once a year board game convention, BGG Con, and our focus out there was similarly to play games that we didn’t play on Sunday and that weren’t in the DGM library. We started adding a wide variety to games we’d played while not really becoming very familiar with many of the games.

Then a change in work schedules, and life in general, put an end to the Sunday night gaming. Gaming was limited to once a month at DGM, once a year at BGG, and various scheduled and random game nights. The big change that this brought about was that the games that were part of our collection were rarely played, and growing a familiarity with the games we played became more sporadic.

I realized that we may have to change our guideline a little bit, because we hadn’t played many games in the collection for a while. I also realized that I missed that feeling of knowing a game well when we sat down to play.

I gave this analogy:

When I was young, and they packed me off to school... Um, when I was a teenager, I had a reasonably good sized collection of albums to listen to. The collection was big enough to provide me with variety, but small enough that I became very familiar with the albums I liked the most.

When I discovered that pawn shops sold music cheap, I started to go a little crazy buying albums. I became less familiar on average with the albums in my collection with the high end being albums that clicked with my taste so that I listened to them all the time and the low end being albums I never even listened to, because I got distracted.

I started to notice that there were albums in my collection that I knew were good because I’d listened at some point, but I couldn’t remember what most of the songs sounded like by seeing the title.

I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing, or if it even matters. I know that this familiarity thing works with everything from subjects of study to how close you are with various friends and family to how well you remember novels, movies, and TV shows.

I don’t even know what the proper balance is. I tend toward deeper familiarity in most areas, but sometimes you have to branch out to avoid missing out on something, or becoming out of touch with the current pop culture.

Chris McGinty is a blogger and board game enthusiast, which makes more sense than if he clained he was a board game and a blogger enthusiast. Sometimes a realistic self image is a good thing.