All the Games on Our Shelves

 YEA!!  After a month of finishing out the semester and then traveling for two weeks, I'm back to gaming again!  I've also got two of my three boys home - we have Jacob here between travels to Australia and Germany, and Caleb is back from Michigan and not yet out at the coast.  The upshot of this is that I get to play MAGIC again, and that makes me happy!!  We played Planechase, which is not a format I had yet posted about here, and so here you have it. Before moving on into that, though, I'm going to be a little bit negative.  I am a gamer - duh, see blog.  I spend time in gaming stores here at home.  My house is filled with hundreds, perhaps thousands of games.  I game whenever I get a chance. SO  .  .  .  on my recent trip to Edinburgh, I thought I'd check out the gaming scene.  I didn't just want to do the touristy thing; I wanted to get local and hang out with "my kind" of people.  I was curious about th...

These days it is me, David, and Jacob in the area, but it is rare that I get a photo of all three of us, as one of us generally has to take the picture.  This weekend we had the chance to meet fellow gamer Adam, a  math professor at CSU Fullerton, who gamed with us and took a picture of our family.  He was a keynote speaker at the CMC^3 Math Conference in Monterey, which is where we were this weekend.  I made sure to connect with him, as I had read in his bio that he has created a freshman-level class on problem solving based entirely on board games.  How cool is that?!?!?!?  I connected with him after his keynote address, and we decided to be in contact after dinner to see if gaming would work out, and it did!  As had we, he too had brought a bag of board games along "just in case."  Below you see them all laid out on this table in the hotel lobby.  It was fun to see that so many of his games were ones we were familiar with (For Sale, Cod...

While at work yesterday, my colleague Ross gifted me with an Hours of Devastation plainswalker promo deck - Nissa: Genesis Mage .  He and Mike and I (and James whom we miss!) used to play during breaks at work.  Breaks don't seem as easy to come by anymore, but with Ross having purchased promo decks for the three of us, I am feeling some hope for fall semester.  Ross knows I love elves, so Nissa for me!  (My sons don't have such a fondness for elves, but, hey, I gotta be me!) Here's what came in the promo pack:  My boys and my colleagues generally beat me pretty soundly, but I enjoy the play so much that I don't care.  Caleb and I played yesterday afternoon so I could start getting familiar with the deck, and, sure enough, he took me down two-for-two with his old vampire duel deck.  I was pretty happy with how mine came up, though - lots of mana was showing up early on, allowing me to play Nissa and those big creatures after a couple more turn...

 It's slightly tricky to do a count of all the games on our shelves - given that many of our games have expansions and we also have multiple versions of the same game or multiple games in one box.  Mostly I'm sticking with counting a game as just one game no matter how many expansions of it we have (see 7 Wonders  which I've counted as 1), but with Magic the Gathering I am going to count each different format we play as an additional game.  The photo below is that of the part of my Magic collection in one area of my closet (and I'm not the only person in this family with a collection of Magic Cards).  I think when  a woman gives up this much of her personal closet space to a game, that game gets to count more than once. We hadn't played the Dominaria set yet, which is the newest set out.  Caleb picked up a couple of packs while he was out shopping today, so we played a game of pack wars in order to introduce ourselves to the set.  We've pla...

Caleb is finally home from college so we can play Magic again! WAHOO!!  We used his cube today, drafted and played.  It felt good!  Pictured below are some cards that served me well.  (For some reason my pictures aren't coming out as well as I'd like - probably because we generally play at night, and I'm dealing with the glare of lights - and because I'm trying to get close-ups in low light - alas.)  I imagine those of you who play Magic will get a sense of what's here despite the unclear photo.  I was going to go Naya (as I usually do), but once I started building my deck, the green that I had, though powerful, seemed like it would be more of a distraction from just getting in there and getting the job done, and it felt like two-color would be a better choice mana-wise than three-color.  (I guess that goes without saying.)  Caleb was playing all kinds of crazy stuff with four color, but he had all kinds of crazy dual lands, shock lands, pain...