I will talk about how I got into the modern board gaming scene. I grew up in the 80s playing all kinds of games, but most of the time it was on the Nintendo. I did play some board games with friends in the neighborhood like Othello, Monopoly, and Battleship. However the Christmas of 1989 I was introduced to a game that really shaped how I viewed tabletop games. That game was HeroQuest by Milton Bradley and Games Workshop.
This game was unlike anything else that I had ever played. There was one person that was controlling a horde of enemies and traps and then there were your friends controlling their heroes. Not only that, but heroes would gain in power over multiple sessions and be able to take on harder challenges.
Later in the early 90s two games had a similar impact on me. The first was Dungeons & Dragons. I went to the local used bookstore and my mom let me purchase the 90s Black Box Starter game of D&D. This came with a one player choose your own adventure/learn how this game works scenario that covered the first third of the included basic adventure in the game starter box. I had played similar systems like this in the form of books like Lone Wolf and even some D&D imprint choose your own adventure type books, but this gave me the tools to create my own adventures.
D&D was fascinating and hard to understand when I first received it. The starter box included a fold out map sheet for the first dungeon. When you finish it though it lets you keep playing, but I was always thinking where do I get more map sheets to keep playing? Eventually I realized that you can do away with having the need to have any kind of map sheet and just let people visualize everything in their head and let them improvise the scenes however they wanted to. This eventually led me to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition.
I dropped Original D&D for AD&D 2E and it is still my favorite system to play in today. I’ve tried other systems from Gurps, Pathfinder, Deathwatch, Savage Worlds, Fiasco, and even a little Shadowrun, but I always seem to come back to the system I really know how to flub and improvise things that I need to and that system is AD&D 2E. I have integrated a few things here and there that I do like in other systems. I really enjoy the initiative system in Savage Worlds for example and use it in my AD&D games liberally.
The other game that really influenced my early tabletop years was Magic: The Gathering. I started playing towards the end of 1994. I didn’t know what I was doing when I first started and I stupidly traded some cards that I shouldn’t have to a kid that was already in the game. In the end I got a Giant Spider and I gave him one of the rare Dual Lands.
The game was interesting like D&D because it had the concepts of making your deck however you wanted to. This was back in the day where the concept of limits in a deck weren’t enforced so you would have decks that were just lightning bolts and fireballs and the occasional grunt. The colors I always like to play at the beginning were Black and Green. Eventually I started doing Black and Blue control decks because a friend I knew that played played that way and I wanted to emulate it.
I played it at school, at my house, at my friend’s houses, basically anywhere I could. I wasn’t very good at MtG, but I liked the game up to the late 90s and then I stopped caring about it as much.
In the mid-90s, I started getting into a different money sink called Warhammer. After having played D&D for a while, I started getting Dragon magazine and Dungeon magazine. I always noticed ads in those magazines for games that weren’t necessarily part of the current TSR (the makers of D&D) line of products. One of these that looked super fun was called Warhammer Quest. I found out it was like HeroQuest, but you could play it without needing a Dungeon Overlord to fight against. It had a simple AI system and I thought it had some really fabulous miniatures. The game came with something that was called the Roleplay Book. This book had detailed stats for a bunch of different monsters not included in the boxed game. This led me to look for these monsters and thus I asked for a copy of the Warhammer Fantasy Battle 5th Edition Starter Box for Christmas.
This box came with enough units to make a small Brettonian Army and a small Lizardmen Army. I really liked the Brettonians and got more of them and eventually I added more Orcs because I already had a bunch of those from Warhammer Quest. Soon I was into Undead and Chaos (Tzeentch). I had a blast playing the game every once in a while with friends on a ping pong table in the garage and I even tried to play the game at a local store. The store owner took me aside and told me he saw me buy miniatures at another store and that I wasn’t welcomed to play there anymore so I never went back to that store again. It went out of business about half a year later.