A Blogwagon post about the games that are important to us

We’re keeping the blogwagon rolling with a prompt from Sam Seer: Your Rule of Three.

Talk about three games that are important to you.

I asked the other playtest dummies to weigh in. We had a great conversation about childhood, nostalgia, and the social power of games. Here are our picks:

Chachi’s Games

This is an incredibly difficult thing for me to answer, but if I have to name three, I will try to keep them very different:

#1 – A video game: Earthbound for the SNES. This game was TRANSCENDENT in its effect on me. The art style, the story, and the gameplay were all mind-blowing for me and still are. Anything that FEELS at all like this game is a must-play for me, and I have continued to come back to this game many times over the years.

#2 – A board game: So many great ones I got to play as a kid, but one that I really loved, and led to my love of TTRPGs, is Heroquest. Great figures, amazing gameplay, and really easy to pick up.

#3 – A playground game: Sardines was a go-to for me as a kid. Essentially, it’s a sort of reverse hide and seek where one person would hide and everyone ran around trying to find them. Once you found them, you hid with them, and the last person to find the hiding group was the next Sardine to start.

The first two have a connecting thread of fantasy and escape, but I think the thing that ties them all together is being with a group. Earthbound is great because you collect an amazing party of friends who go around saving communities. Heroquest, you go and save a town with a group of friends by defeating a dungeon. And Sardines, you find your friend and hope more of your friends show up soon.

Honorable Mentions: Quest for Glory, a combination point/click adventure and level-up RPG. It was a whole series and it’s amazing. Mille Bornes, just a solid card game. And Capture the Flag. Many a late night playing capture the flag in the weird hills and canyons of my hometown. Amazing, trying to crawl through the mud, trying not to get caught by your friends.

Josh’s Games

Games are very important. I’d argue games are fundamental to the arc of human history, but that’s probably a different blog post…

They are also important to my development and my survival as a human being (I’m not being dramatic here). My relationship with games, playing games, and learning how to play games has had and continues to have a formative effect on my life.

As a young child, I struggled in a broken home, had a hard time making friends, was a bit of a hot-head, a spaz that was likely to go off on a kid who made me feel unsafe. I didn’t have a real friend until 4th grade.

#1 – That friend introduced me to the N64 and all the glory that came with it. The late nights and sleepovers spent playing make Super Mario 64 the first entry on this list. It evolved platform gaming in a way that, honestly, hasn’t been replicated to date. I’m still doing perfect time runs, still connecting with this old friend over how horrifying the eel used to be. It became a base of refuge for me as a young child: his home, this game, that friendship. So Mario 64; not my favorite game (probably not even a top ten), but arguably the most important by far.

#2 – It has to be Dungeons & Dragons (3rd edition). My first introduction to TTRPGs and the one responsible for hooking me for life. It kick-started my creative writing passion and gave me a much-needed outlet. I swear that D&D was like therapy for me.

#3 – The hardest one to suss out is Pool. Yes, the bar game. I think playing pool feels cool, especially at a crowded bar, a place that typically feels very uncomfortable for me. I found bar games were the perfect way for me to actually plug into a scene I had a hard time relating to. Pool got me through college and, honestly, became something of a bridge builder for me, especially when I started playing in a pool bar league.

This was a really hard and surprisingly emotional thought exercise. Honorable Mentions are too vast to count, but I would put Cribbage, Sonic Spinball, and Dominion on here, too.

James’ Games

#1 – Star Fox 64. It’s the first game I remember binging and being interested in completing and unlocking all the secrets. Before this game, I don’t think I played anything for more than an hour or so straight.

#2 – The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. My first introduction to RPGs of any kind. Hundreds of hours were poured into two or three characters.

#3 – Dominion. The first designer board game I remember playing, and the one that sparked my love for board games. Before Dominion, I had only ever played mass-market board games and was never that into them.

My top three all introduced me to new aspects of gaming that I am still a fan of today. Honorable Mentions would be D&D 3.5, Terraforming Mars, and Ocarina of Time.

Nick’s Games

#1 – Command & Conquer: Red Alert. My brother and I bonded over trying to beat these games at the highest difficulty. And the silliness of the FMV cutscenes helped define my sense of humor.

#2 – Icewind Dale. My first introduction to D&D. After I finally learned the mechanics of the video game, I started looking into the tabletop version. The rest is history.

#3 – Risk. As simplistic as it seems now, I never would have picked up any more complex board games had it not been for my dad, brother, and I playing Risk till midnight after the three of us moved to New Orleans.

Savanna’s Games

#1 – Scrutineyes. A game my family had, though no one else remembers it or knows where we got it from. It was created around a series of artworks by Mike Wilks, where each image is a realistic tableau crammed full of things that start with a particular letter of the alphabet. You have a short amount of time to list as many things as you can from the painting that start with the letter. Sounds easy, but it really relies on obscure and specific niche words for a lot of the answers. I played this game a few times with friends, but more often I stared at the paintings, maybe naming as many as I could to myself, but mostly just being absorbed in the image. This game heavily influenced my taste in and love of art. I bought the game as an adult to frame the cards, and I still stare.

#2 – Tiny Tales. A homebrew TTRPG campaign that used Fellowship 2e, a Lord of the Rings-inspired ruleset. I’ve played many TTRPGs at this point, and what I like the most is that they facilitate spending time with each other. We share food, laughs, sometimes arguments, and occasionally meaningful moments. I’m spotlighting this game in particular because it was my favorite theme to date. Being tiny in a world we can otherwise picture gave perfect opportunities to creatively interact with the setting. I also loved the tone, striking a balance between cute and humorous, and devastatingly serious, which I believe is the recipe for a perfect story.

#3 – So Clover. No one will be surprised I chose this, as it’s a favorite game of mine. I don’t really like complex rules, or strategy, or doing the same thing over and over, which makes a lot of games exercises in torture for me. This game commits none of these sins. You’ll never encounter the same prompts, nor the same clues from other players. It’s a delightful exercise in making connections and trying to decipher how your friends’ minds work, an absolute favorite pastime of mine. A perfect game that has somewhat healed my trauma from being forced to play or observe Rock Band.

Christopher’s Games

#1 – In middle school, a theater teacher ran an after-school D&D club. Ten or more of us kids all in one classroom, with Mr. Tepe at the front using an overhead projector to display the world and dungeon maps. We’d say we go left, he’d turn the projector off, trace the path from his map onto the transparency film, then remove his map and turn the projector back on to show us our next choice. At the time, it was wild, silly fun, with lots of Monty Python quotes and ridiculous solutions to puzzles and traps. Mr. Tepe brought the characters to life with voices and mannerisms. It felt like magic. Looking back as a long-time GM, I don’t know how he managed it all. Years later, I asked him about the system he was running. He said it was his own homebrew mix of AD&D and GURPS. I’ll always be thankful to Mr. Tepe for getting me started.

#2 – Fate. After college, and a failed attempt to get back into the hobby with D&D 4e, I started running Fate games in a number of genre-blending settings. Lost meets The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Southern gothic urban fantasy noir detectives. Reluctant temporal agents, who were veterans of The Blood War, in a snowy mountain town that time forgot, fighting off body-snatching shadow slugs and Imperial doppelgangers while operating out of a video rental store. Fate is flexible and intuitive. I haven’t played in a while, but I could still run an impromptu game with zero prep.

#3 – I’ve been working on a campaign setting on and off for over a decade: Rainbow City. A Studio Ghibli-inspired, post-scarcity megacity, where you play as a group of kids parkouring around and getting into trouble. It started as a Fate game, but recently we’ve been experimenting with some post-OSR hacks, trying to find a system that makes traveling and exploring the megatropolis a core element of gameplay. I’m basically back where I started with simple characters and rules, and inventory management.

Honorable Mentions: I Spy books, flashlight tag, Pokémon Red and Blue, 13 Dead End Drive.