I hold Doug entirely responsible for all of this! And halfway through I have the sudden urge to prefix the rest with a blanket statement. I have never LARPed!
I bought some B5 CCG cards on ebay the other day, by some I mean I bought two boxes worth. For almost nothing really, certainly compared to the prices I use to pay for them. They arrived yesterday. So last night I spent about 20 minutes ripping through packages looking for good cards and having bits and pieces of the game come back to me.
I realised that I miss it quite a bit. I use to spend a whole lot of time playing CCG’s. Mainly media tie in stuff, B5, Star Trek, Star Wars, Tomb Raider all spring to mind, Lord of the Rings for a while, I have a couple of nice decks there and of course the odd game of Magic. It should be noted that I do not and have not ever own any magic cards. I did go along to various gaming events I spent some time a lot of Irish events in the mid to late nineties, Gaelcon being the big Dublin one, and an odd weekend down in Cork at a bigger event that I can’t for the life of me remember. Played at a few cons over in the UK aswell but nothing really major there, it was more a case of meeting someone I knew who played and dragging a game together.
Pre CCG, I use to play Heroquest and Space Crusade. These naturally lead into 40K and I still have a very basic Space Marine army back in Dublin. A friend and I created our own game using the Star Trek micro machines. We spent a long long time writing out some rules and created at least a 6 foot by 6 foot playing board. I remember we once played it on the roof of a decent enough sized kitchen and it took a whole lot of space.
Never really got into D&D, I did play a few paper based RPG, I don’t remember what they were. That was in my early teens I guess, there was a group of around 6 of us that use to play but the group disintegrated/grew apart as they tend to do at that age.
I did bring most of my cards when I moved to London, aside from them being valuable (at the time unfortunately), I wanted to have them to try and find a group that I could go along and play with. I never really did. I went to a LOTR tournament once but after signing up for everything and never hearing back from the organisers, I gave up. Not being the best with new groups of people I don’t know and not liking walking in blindly, I really didn’t feel like doing it again. I’m sure I still have decks made up and unsorted cards for a few things.
Sometime soon I’m going to sit down and organise all my B5 cards. I’m not sure when but sometime when I can have some space and time to work. That pretty much means when the mood strikes, but unlike the rest of the things I want to sort out (books, dvds, cds) I don’t need new furniture to do it and it will no doubt clear me up some space. I had pretty much a complete set until later expansions, I have several unsorted boxes of said expansions that will be fun to go through some rainy bored afternoon.
That’s one thing I dislike about online gaming. There is always something to do, I rarely have a boring Saturday afternoon. I just have to log on to Eve or CoH and I have something to do. It’s not a bad thing really but it does leave everything that’s waiting for a little time waiting that little longer.
Anyway someday maybe I’ll look into some gaming in London, more than likely I’ll end up ebaying more B5 cards and pining for the good old days 😉
Oh and the reason it’s all Doug’s fault? Well he use to play B5 CCG too and it came up in conversation and I dug at my cards at the first Halo night a few weeks ago. Looks like a second Halo night this coming weekend in honour of Halo 2 out at all good stores Thursday!