An Introduction

by Ed Rozmiarek

I have liked to play games for most of my life. I remember playing many games of Monopoly, Risk, The Inventors, Stadium Checkers and others with my brothers when I was younger. We also dabbled in games like Panzer Battles and Dune. This continued in college, playing board games and role-playing games with roommates and my future wife, Susan. This is when I found one of my favorite games, Star Fleet Battles which I would play with my roommate. Unfortunately, I don't play this game much any more due to the time it takes to play the game and the lack of opponents (Susan hates rules intensive war games). Over the past few years, we have been searching for new games that both Susan and I liked and could play in the evening after getting the kids to bed or with the kids. We tried Magic: The Gathering, which worked fairly well as long as we both got the same number of expansions and boosters. But it is hard to get new people into it and keep things even. Later we tried Dragon Dice which we never really liked. Finally, we came across Robo Rally which Susan got me for my birthday in 1997. We both just loved RoboRally and played it often over the next year. During this year, we started scratching the surface of this new gaming area of "German" games, reading the rec.games.board newsgroup and board game web sites. It wasn't until Christmas of 1998 when the fever really struck after we got the Settlers of Catan Card Game. We were hooked. It was the birth of two new SpielFreaks. Soon afterward, I found out that Dan Becker, a co-worker down the hall from me, was also a big game player. We started getting together with a couple of others from work to play games. We started the Lunchtime Gamers Club at work where several of us play games twice a week during lunch. There is a sister group, the Lonely Hearts Club, which is actually a little older that we also belong to. This group plays Hearts twice a week. (If you work for IBM and have access to the IBM internal web, check out our web pages at Lunchtime Gamers or Lonely Hearts Club which have the stats from our games.) Susan and I have spent the last couple of years "catching up" and amassing a collection of over 250 games. We tend to get two player games or games that play well with two players since a majority of our gaming is just the two of us. But, we also have gotten many multi-player games that we play with our gaming friends. Also, we like games that we can play with our two sons (ages 10 and 7). We are often surprised with what games go over well with the boys. This web site documents our gaming hobby with our collection of web links and such. We hope you enjoy it.

Posted by Ed Rozmiarek at January 10, 2001 12:00 PM