Hedgehogs and Gaming: A Beginning

I first came across modern board games at Beatrix Potter’s House.

I’m not kidding. My wife and I were on a bus tour all over the United Kingdom and one of the stops was at the famed author’s house for tea and crumpets with jam.

Again, not kidding.

It was a lovely home with a lovely dog. They packed all 30 of us into small tiny rooms obviously built for a small author, her husband and the random hedgehog or two.

This home was not a museum.  An actual family lived there, living on the premises, welcoming people during the day and sleeping upstairs at night.

Being a British Heritage site, they could not change ANYTHING without government permission and reams of paperwork.  So, they lived a very old fashioned life as well.  I’m not even sure if they had indoor plumbing.

What they did have was shelves and shelves of board games.

I had never seen such a sight.  Boxes upon boxes of different sizes and colors.  These were not the games I knew from childhood.

I was curious.

A couple of months later, I came across a board game meet-up in the side room of a restaurant.  I couldn’t stay but I was at least able to see some of the games in action.

Again, I was seeing colors and pieces I was not used to.  These games seemed to tell stories and be about very big things.  

Heck, some of the ones I saw being played didn’t even have dice.

How did you play these things? What stories were these games telling?  What was their secret?

I was intrigued.

A short few months after that, a co-worker at my job threw a board game night.  I sat down and learned a game.

It was a heady experience.  The dice roll didn’t move pieces, it brought things to you.  There weren’t any tokens to move around.  The few pieces that you did put on the board went IN BETWEEN the tiles?

There was negotiation.  And strategy.  

And an itch.

An itch to quickly play it again because I knew, I KNEW, I could do better next time.

I was hooked.

Thus began a six year long and counting love affair with everything Table Top.  I dove headlong into board games and I have yet to come up for air.