About seven years ago I was introduced to a trading card game. It's a memory I hold fondly. It opened the door to a whole new venue of mental exercise. My time was spent studying cards and combinations, looking for things that others might have missed in the hopes of finding a strategy that would be both simple to execute and yet dramatic in effect. I would stay up before tournaments and plot my course, or spend a few hours before a tournament in flurried activity to remedy a flaw in my deck.
When I wasn't looking through my cards or modifying my decks, I was often online on forums, reading and posting about strategies or the most recent changes to rules. In my local circle of players I became an authority on the rules of the game, often serving as mediator when questions were raised. Though I was never consistently the best player at the tournaments we held, I was a force to be reckoned with.
Then three years after it started, it came to an abrupt end. The game's owning company put it on an indefinite hold while they took the license in other directions. Since then, I've had many life changing events. I've gotten married and now have a daughter. We've bought a house and I now have a full-time job. However, the urge to play still strikes now and again.
Unfortunately for me, playing is more than just taking the decks and playing a single match. For me, playing the game is the strategy beforehand. The plotting and building of a deck that will have some new twist. But without the gaming community to appreciate the ingenuity or even to play against the ideas I constructed, the flavor was gone. So that left me with one option; move on to a new game.
One problem: A new game means a new investment into a game. Moreover any game is either a risk or too big to take on. New games have a habit of lasting for a year or two and then losing either the support of the community of players or the support of the producing company. In either case, they soon disappear, meaning that anyone who has invested in cards is in the same situation I find myself in currently.
Other games, like Magic: The Gathering, are so immense that becoming competitive alone would be a very time (and money) consuming task. With an established game, a player has a hard time catching up to the current state of the game simply because they haven't had the time to build up a library of cards, much less learn the nuances and interactions of the cards that veteran players know from experience. Regardless, both scenarios mean money has to be invested and, at present, investing money into anything non-essential isn't an option.
So, if I can't move on to a fresh game and I can't turn to an established game, what have I left? At the moment, I've been contenting myself with other venues of strategy. Real time strategy games on the computer, Chess, and Settler's of Catan are a few of my outlets. But sadly none of them really provide the in depth planning I had enjoyed before. And so, for now, I merely co-exist with my gaming itch. One day, perhaps, I'll be able to justify spending some money on it and jumping into a new game. Until then, Chess, anyone?
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