We had a couple of groups of friends who would play Call of Cthulhu, and the odd boardgame back in the mid-80’s.

Problem is, all of us were at Georgia Tech, meaning that we had internet access in 1986 or so. A LOT of the folks who were active at that time ended up at the Gathering in the early 90’s. Rec.games.board, Sumo, the odd email, and word of mouth were mostly how information flowed in the very early days.

My first internet gaming was on a MUD somewhere… ah, the not-so-good old days of text only role-playing

dale

My first gaming outside my immediate family occured in 1980, when a co-worker at my first job introduced me to role playing.  I fell for it hard and suddenly my weekends were gloriously full.  That first group was strictly role players, but as we evolved, we got some folks who also liked board games and I was only too pleased to introduce some new and old discoveries to them.  So no internet there (it barely existed).

My first exposure to German gaming also was non-electronic; it was through some articles in Games Magazine.  This led to a few purchases at a local game store.  Settlers met with some approval, but the game that really stuck was Alan Moon’s Airlines (Serenissima was also a hit sometime later).  But we were boardgaming less and less and soon, we were almost exclusively an RPG group.

Where the internet really affected me was showing me the full extent of the German gaming scene.  Once again, Games Magazine planted the seed, by listing some game sites that discussed the games, including The Game Cabinet.  This led me to an amazing world that I had no idea existed and I was in heaven!  But I still needed folks to play with.  Internet to the rescue again!  Greg Schloesser (who I only knew from his excellent Westbank Gamers site) had just put together the all-star juries for the first Gamers Choice Awards (which later became the IGA).  On r.g.b, he gave a link for the awards website, which, among other things, listed bios for each of the voters.  To my shock, I found that Ben Baldanza, who I knew from his writings on Counter, lived only half an hour away from me!  I emailed him, asked if I could attend some sessions with his games group, and was immediately ushered into the wonderful set of individuals known as the DC Gamers.  My gaming (and regular) life hasn’t been the same since!

One of the things that makes boardgaming different from many other hobbies (for example, reading, listening to music, watching movies, scrapbooking, stamp collecting) is that we generally need someone else (or better yet, 2 - 3 other people) to fully enjoy it.  Since the internet is perfectly suited for bringing people together, it doesn’t surprise me that the world wide web is the keystone for many of us in the early days of our hobby.  Are there other hobbies that have blossomed in the last 20 years because the internet was able to bring people together?  For example, has square dancing seen a boost, since it also requires minority hobbyists to find each other (preferably 7 others and a caller)?  Hmmm....  I used to love square dancing when I was in elementary school.  Maybe it’s time to search the internet for a group near me!

We’ve been playing games in Bud’s basement since since I was a kid in 1978.  Thirty years! Ouch.

Well it wasn’t too hard to find boardgaming before the Internet, since the Internet hasn’t existed most of the time I’ve been boardgaming.

Friday night was always board game night in my house while I was growing up in the ‘60s and early ‘70s - Parker and MB games like Park & Shop, Clue, and Careers were popular as although they operated by the stereotypical dice movement, there were decisions to be made such as planning an efficient shopping route or career path. 3M games like Stocks & Bonds, Acquire, Mr. President, Executive Decision, Venture, and Sleuth were popular.

College in the early ‘70s was marked by Avalon-Hill games like 1776 and Third Reich, which were never really my cup of tea, but war games were about the only meat around then.

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, after moving to the Boston area, I found Games People Play in Cambridge, MA, a treasure house of small print run US games, British games (including 1829 and Civilization before they were picked up by Avalon Hill), and some German games. Also about that time I was making regular visits to Montreal, where I found a game store that had a lot of Ravensburger games in French (which I had taken in high school) like Grand Safari (Wildlife Adventure), Le Tapis Volant (Flying Carpet), (Le Tour du Monde en 80 Jours (Around the World in 80 Days, by Wolfgang Kramer), and Sid Sackson’s Metropolis, which still has never appeared in English. Though all of these would be considered family games by today’s gamer standards, each was far better than anything in print in the US at the time, and though they went through a lull in the ‘90s, Ravensburger still has a soft spot in my esteem for creating family games with some depth (Arkadia, Australia, and San Marco being more recent examples).

Also about that time I happened to stay at an inn in Vermont that had a pretty good collection of British games for use by guests. I was curious about these games, and on my next visit to Games People Play I asked about how to get a hold of a couple of them (among these were games by the now long defunct company Intellect Ltd.) and was handed a British game magazine Games & Puzzles and was pointed to an ad for a game store near London.  That started a relationship with Eamon Bloomfield, who owned Games Unlimited in Kingston on Thames. We traded games for years, and he introduced me to the games that were just starting to come to market in Germany.

My more social gaming (beyond immediate family and friends) took off in the mid-’80s. I was an editor at a small daily newspaper at the time, and wrote a Christmas season article on board games for the paper. Alan Moon, who happened to live in the same city, saw it and sent me copies of the newsletter he produced for his board game club and invited me to attend. I did, and was surprised to find Alan was getting into German games then too. He had made contact with Mike Siggins and Brian Walker in England, and they were trading euro games with hime the way Bloomfield was with me. Surprisingly, very few of our games overlapped. The game group Alan started in the ‘80s has pretty much continuously existed in one form or another since then, regularly meeting one Saturday a month for a day of gaming. When Alan was running the group, he produced a monthly newsletter that mirrors today’s Internet game session and game news reports; it was so good that I saved the copies and still have them.

And in those pre-Internet days, Mike Siggins and Brian Walker were exceedingly helpful to us US folk. Brian produced Games International magazine for a couple of years. Mike started the Sumo “fanzine”, the forerunner of Counter, also something that was so good that I’ve saved all my copies. Part of Sumo was the German Rules Bank, to which readers contributed translations of German games and Mike mailed out rules sets as time permitted, which was a great service pre-email.

Then of course, with the ‘90s, the Internet came and all the old ways of doing things went to hell (although Counter is still around).

I have been a gamers since the late 1960s. I got my info and bought non-mass market games at hobby shops. Starting with Origins IV in the late 1970s, I also got info and games at game cons. I did mail order (from Avalon Hill) 2 or 3 times, but mostly it was hobby shops and game cons.

The switch to the internet happened fairly abruptly for me when, in 1996, I moved from Southern California to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The local hobby shops were/are pretty short on the kind of games I was/am looking for and there were no local game cons. Fortunately, I have been able to learn about and buy games online.

I don’t think the wide variety of small print run games that we see to day would exist without the internet.

Thanks Bob and Eric!!!  Those are exactly the kinds of stories I wanted to hear about!!!  If anyone else has a story like it, please post!

When I say things went to hell after the Internet, my tongue is, of course, firmly planted in my cheek.

To make a long story longer, and to mention some key names that I left out of the earlier post, as the Internet was ramping up there was a good-size community of gamers using the rec.games.board news group to communicate.

Also, Ken Tidwell on the West Coast had an early website, gamecabinet.com, on which he posted gaming articles and where Sumo and the Rules Bank migrated. The site is still up, although it hasn’t been updated in eight years, but you can still go to it and read Ken’s articles and Sumo, download from the rules bank, and get a good picture what was going on in board gaming 1994-2000. The Rules Bank eventually migrated over to Frank Branham’s Gaming Dumpster, which eventually dumped itself on to BoardGameGeek.

Before the online stores, in addition to Games People Play in Cambridge, Gamescape in San Francisco also imported a number of eurogames. And Mark Green at the former Just Games in London was also a great source for imports and translations.

And then there were mail-order operations. Ray Pfeifer in Baltimore ran R&D games for a couple of years in the ‘90s, and then Alan Moon started The European Game Source. Alan eventually sold his stock to Funagain in 1997 as it was expanding its Web shop, which was the end of mail-order-only (as opposed to Internet order) as far as I recall.

The age of electronic mail and internet medium isn’t as different as folks might think form that age of paper mail and medium that began the hobby. 

Any activity (like gaming) becomes a hobby when people start interacting around it (its about the people, eh? ) So too was the birth of gaming:

- Folks created fanzines that were mailed out (Like Jack Scruby’s 1957 War Game Digest) and had places to list opponents wanted and hobby shops that sold hobby games. The community was booming.

- People recruited in fanzines for play-by mail (pbm) games that are very similar to turn based Spiel-by-web implementations of today. PBM thrived in the 1960’s as 1961’s Diplomacy was hot and it had many home grown imitations being run by hand over the mail.

- Folks who played over mail for years developed bonds that led to traveling to early game conventions where you could see and buy games instead of buying sight unseen based on some adds and reviews in a fanzine.

- Local clubs sprang up for PBM folks that lived close enough together to meet face to face (still recruiting in fanzines and magazine of the era).  For my area we a loose collection of clubs tied together called the International Federation of Wargamers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Federation_of_Wargamers

There’s a good early timeline at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~beattie/timeline2.html that if you look at it gives you a sense of how the mail based cliques of that era weren’t that different from our online cliques today.

Also theres a wonderful recap of how one persons hand moderated pbm first became computer moderated at: http://www.flyingbuffalo.com/history.htm

Good topic, Val.

I started playing games when I was in Junior High in the early eighties.  I didn’t even have a modem to access bulletin boards, let alone Internet access. I met people through school, particularly through the D&D club.  We played the Traveller RPG, Call of Cthulhu, and Champions.  On days when I didn’t have an adventure (I like to GM) we played Diplomacy, Civilization, Dune and many Tom Wham games.  I still play with some of those guys today.  In the nineties I played mostly RPGs with some Titan thrown in. 

I took a break after I started dating my wife.  I had access to the internet back in 1995, but I didn’t use it for gaming then.  I started playing D&D 3rd edition after my son was born in 2000 and some Munchkin when I didn’t have an adventure ready.  I also bought a whole bunch of Cheapass games and played them as well.

In about 2003 I discovered BGG from a Cheapass games mailing list.  Soon after I bought Puerto Rico and played it with my D&D group.  This was my first introduction to Euros and we all loved it.  We started playing boardgames on Sundays and RPGs on Fridays.  After reading about other games on BGG and discovering discounted internet retailers, my boardgame collection started taking off.  So while I’ve been a gamer for 25 years or so, the internet got me playing Euros and moving beyond my AH moldy oldies.  And now my children are old enough to play boardgames with me.  After I showed my son a session report I wrote on a Heroscape game we played, he wanted to write up his own version.  So I created a BGG account for him.  He hasn’t finished his session report, but I can see the day coming when he’s a member of the Internet boardgame community as well.

Valerie,

I’m glad the Tilt is working out for you. It is still at the top of my current list but of course there is always something new and better coming. In this case it is the Blackberry 9000 (aka Bold) coming out this summer. All of the features I want plus it appears it is iTunes compatible!

See you at Origins…