One of my mottos for gaming is, "never lose the joy of playing in pursuit of winning."
So when I can't seem to figure out an answer in Draw Something, for example, I amuse myself..
HA! HA! FART GUN! IT IS A GUN THAT SHOOTS FARTS! HA!
Last summer, Felicia Day asked me if I wanted to develop a show together for her new premium YouTube channel, Geek and Sundry.
Spoiler alert: I said yes.
She asked me if I wanted to do a show about gaming, maybe a review show or something like that.
"I think it would be more fun do something where we play games," I said. Then, the light bulb went off.
"Oh my god," I said, "What if we did something that was like Celebrity Poker meets Dinner for Five, where we got interesting people we know together for tabletop games?!"
Felicia thought it sounded awesome, I was really excited about the idea, and we got to work. It took a few months to develop, and in December we finally shot our first block of episodes. In February, we got the band back together and shot another block of episodes, and just last week, I finished locking down the final edits for all the shows (that's why I couldn't come to Wondercon on Friday.)
In season one of the show, we play games like Settlers of Catan, The Last Night on Earth, Munchkin, Small World, and Alhambra. Some of the players include Grant Imahara, Sean Plott (better known as Day[9]), Dodger Leigh, Ryan Higa, Beth Riesgraf, Phil Lamarr, Morgan Webb, Garfunkle and Oats, Veronica Belmont, and Colin Ferguson.
My ulterior motive with Tabletop is to show by example how much fun it is to play boardgames. I want to show that Gamers aren't all a bunch of weirdoes who can't make eye contact when they talk to you, and that getting together for a game night is just as social and awesome as getting together to watch Sportsball, or to play poker, or for a LAN party, or whatever non-gamers do with their friends. I want to inspire people to try hobby games, and I want to remove the stigma associated with gaming and gamers.
I'm pretty sure we succeeded. By the second day of production, our crew was grabbing games out of our games library to play at lunch. All of our interns and production assistants have become complete game fanatics, and whenever I edit a show, all I want to do is go home and play that game until my face falls off.
I hope you'll subscribe to our channel, and please tell your friends about Tabletop.
When Ryan was a Junior in college, he moved to a place where he couldn't have cats. Anne and I agreed to foster them until he took them back.
That was nearly three years ago.
When he moved across the country for his job, we officially adopted the cats we'd been fostering for years. Ryan misses them as much as we miss him, but it's worked out well for everyone. Anne and I grew to love his cats, and if you follow me on Twitter*, you know that I find the cats to be endlessly entertaining.
One of the cats, Luna, can be rather insistent about us paying attention to her. One of the ways she lets us know that we're not doing her bidding** in a way that pleases her involves pulling all of the tissues out of the tissue box when we're gone for a day, completely shredding a roll of paper towels while we're at the store, and unrolling an entire roll of toiler paper over night for some reason.
All of these things are intended to capture attention from both of us. When Luna really wants to get my attention, though, she goes after my gaming dice.
Seriously. One day, I found two full sets of dice underneath the couch in my office. The thing is, those sets were on a shelf in my closet, in a bag. I don't know how she did it, but I'm convinced that whatever skillset she used could just as easily be applied to the task of murdering me in my sleep, so I just laughed it off and told her that it was a real good thing that she did that. Real good, Luna! REAL REAL GOOD! It's a real good thing that you did that! HAHAHAHAHAHA!
Um. Anyway.
A couple of days ago, I took my wallet, keys, and the d20 I carry with me just about everywhere (unless it's a d12 for some reason)*** and set them on our kitchen counter. About twenty minutes later, while I sat in my office, I heard a clang! sound, followed by Anne laughing. I walked out to see what was up, and Anne showed me the picture she had taken, shortly after the clang!:
In case you can't tell, Luna knocked my d20 off the counter and into our dogs' water dish. That's her little head reflected in the silver dish, which actually makes this picture kind of cute.
"She rolled a sixteen," Anne said, a touch of admiration in her voice that I've never heard whenever I've rolled a sixteen.
"Of course she did. It's not like it was a difficult to-hit roll."
Anne looked at me.
"I mean, she has terrain advantage, her target is prone, and…" I trailed off.
"You know what? Forget it. I'm just going to pick up my d20 and be on my way."
Anne and Luna gave me disapproving looks as I walked back to my office. I wiped my die off on my pants and gave it right back to them.
*I'm sorry, really, I am, but I told you that you shouldn't. You have nobody to blame but yourself.
**Dogs have masters; cats have staff.
***Like the one I gave Hardwick when I was on his show.
This was originally written and posted in 2008:
I just found out that Gary Gygax died. He was only 69.
I failed my save vs. stunning blow, so forgive me if this isn't the most polished thing in the world.
For most geeks, RPGs are a huge part of who we are, and many of the games I've loved — and continue to love — probably wouldn't exist as they do without Gary Gygax. The news reports are calling him "the father of D&D," but he was really the father of all role playing games, whether they were played with dice and paper, a deck of cards, or on a computer. Yeah, wargames existed before D&D, and fantasy existed before D&D, but D&D is the game that introduced fantasy gaming to my generation.
I didn't know him, and never met him, but his impact upon my life can't be overstated.
To honor his passing, I'd like to share an excerpt from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Geek, from Happiest Days of Our Lives:
December, 1983
I sat on the floor in Aunt Val’s house and opened up her Christmas present to me. It was a red box with a really cool-looking dragon on the front of it. Inside, there were a few books, some dice, a map, and a crayon to color in the dice.
“That’s a game that I hear lots of kids like to play, Willow,” she said. “It’s dragons and wizards and those things you liked from The Hobbit. The back says you use your imagination, and I know what a great imagination you have.” My brother played with Legos and my cousins played with handheld electronic games. I felt a little gypped.
“Wow,” I said, masking my disappointment. “Thanks, Aunt Val!”
Later, while the other kids played with Simon and Mattel Electronic Football, I sat near the fireplace and examined my gift. It said that I could be a wizard or a fighter, but there weren’t any pieces that looked like that. There were a lot of weird dice, but I had to color in the numbers. That seemed silly, but at least it was something to do, so I grabbed the black crayon and rubbed it over the pale blue dice, just like the instructions said.
Aunt Val (who was my favorite relative in the world throughout my entire childhood and right up until she died a few years ago) walked into the living room. “What do you think, Willow?”
“I colored the dice,” I said, and showed her the result. “But I haven’t read the book yet.”
She patted my leg. “Well, I hope you like it.” She moved to the other side of the room, where my cousin Jack poked at a Nintendo Game and Watch.
I opened the Player’s Guide and began to read.
February, 1984
It was afternoon PE in fifth grade, and I was terrified. I ran and jumped and ducked, surrounded by a jeering crowd of my classmates. The PE teacher did nothing to stop the attack – and, in fact, encouraged it.
“Get him!” someone yelled as I fell to the asphalt, small rocks digging into my palms. I breathed hard. Through my adrenaline-fueled flight-or-fight response, the world slowed, the jeering faded, and I wondered to myself why our playground was just a parking lot and why we had to wear corduroy pants in the middle of a Southern California heat wave. Before I could offer any answers, a clear and loud voice spoke from within my head. “Hey,” it said. “You’d better get up and move, or you’re dead.”
I nodded my head and looked up in time to see the red playground ball, spinning in slow motion, as the word “Voit” rotated into view. Pain exploded across my face and a mighty cheer erupted from the crowd. The PE teacher blew her whistle.
I don’t know how I managed to be the last kid standing on our team. I usually ran right to the front of the court so I could get knocked out quickly and (hopefully) painlessly before the good players got worked up by the furor of battle and started taking head shots, but I’d been stricken by a bout of temporary insanity – possibly caused by the heat – on this February day, and I’d actually played to win the game, using a very simple strategy: run like hell and hope to get lucky.
I blinked back tears as I looked up at Jimmie Just, who had delivered the fatal blow. Jimmie was the playground bully. He spent as much time in the principal’s office as he did in our classroom, and he was the most feared dodgeball player at the Lutheran School of the Foothills.
He laughed at me, his long hair stuck to his face in sweaty mats, and sneered. “Nice try, Wil the Pill.”
I picked myself up off the ground, determined not to cry. I sucked in deep breaths of air through my nose.
Mrs. Cooper, the PE teacher, walked over to me. “Are you okay, Wil?” she asked.
“Uh-huh,” I lied. Anything more than that and I risked breaking down into humiliating sobs that would follow me around the rest of the school year, and probably on into sixth grade.
“Why don’t you go wash off your face,” she said, not unkindly, “and sit down for a minute.”
“Okay,” I said. I walked slowly across the blacktop to the drinking fountains. Maybe if I really took my time, I could run out the clock and I wouldn’t have to play another stupid dodgeball game.
January, 1984
Papers scattered across my bed appeared to be homework to the casual observer, but to me they were people. A thief, a couple of wizards, some fighters: a party of adventurers who desperately wanted to storm The Keep on the Borderlands. But without anyone to guide them, they sat alone, trapped in the purgatory of my bedroom, straining behind college-ruled blue lines to come to life.
I tried to recruit my younger brother to play with me, but he was 7, and more interested in Monchichi. The kids in my neighborhood were more interested in football and riding bikes, so I was left to read through module B2 by myself, wandering the Caves of Chaos and dodging Lizard Men alone.
February, 1984
I washed my face and drank deeply from the drinking fountain. By the time I made it back to the benches along the playground’s southern edge, I’d lost the urge to cry, but my face radiated enough heat to compete with the blistering La Crescenta sun.
I sat down near Simon Teele, who, thanks to the wonders of alphabetization, ended up with me and Harry Yan (the school’s lone Asian kid) on field trips, on fire drills, and in chapel. Simon was taller than all of us, wore his hair down into his face, and really kept to himself. He was reading an oversized book that sort of looked like a textbook, filled with charts and tables.
We weren’t officially friends, but I knew him well enough to make polite conversation.
“Hey,” I said. “Why don’t you have to play dodgeball?”
“Asthma,” he said.
“Lucky,” I said. “I hate dodgeball.”
“Everyone hates dodgeball,” he said, “except Jimmie Just.”
“Yeah,” I said, relieved to hear someone else say out loud what I’d been thinking since fourth grade.
“Hey,” I said. “What are you reading?”
He held up the book and I saw its cover: a giant statue, illuminated by torches, sat behind an archway. Two guys were on its head, prying loose one of its jeweled eyes, as a group of people stood at the base. One was clearly a wizard; another was obviously a knight.
“Player’s Handbook,” he said. “Do you play D&D?”
I gasped. According to our ultra-religious school, D&D was Satanic. I looked up for teachers, but none were nearby. A hundred feet away on the playground, another game of dodgeball was underway. I involuntarily flinched when I heard the hollow pang! of the ball as it skipped off the ground.
“You’re going to get in trouble if you get caught with that,” I said.
“No, I won’t,” he said. “If I just keep it turned upside down, they’ll never see it. So do you play or not?”
“I have the red box set,” I said, “and a bunch of characters, but I don’t have anyone to play with.”
“That’s Basic,” he said. “This is Advanced.”
“Oh.”
“But if you want, you could come over to my house this weekend and we could play.”
I couldn’t believe my good luck. With a dodgeball to the face, Fate put me on the bench next to the kid who, over the next few months, helped me take my first tentative steps down the path to geekdom. He had a ton of AD&D books: the Dungeon Master’s Guide, which had a truly terrifying demon on the cover, and would result in certain expulsion if seen at school; the Monster Manual, which was filled with dragons; and the Fiend Folio, which not only had demons and devils, but a harpy and a nymph, accompanied by a drawing of a naked woman! with boobs!!
Simon’s parents were divorced, and he lived with his mom in a huge house in La Canada. His room was filled with evidence of a custody Cold War. Too many toys to count littered the floor and spilled out of the closet, but even though we were surrounded by Atari and Intellivision, GI Joe and Transformers, we had D&D fever, and the only prescription was more polyhedral dice.
Of all the things I do that make me a geek, nothing brings me as much joy as gaming. It all started with the D&D Basic Set, and today it takes an entire room in my house to contain all of my books, boxes, and dice.
Thank you for giving us endless worlds to explore, Gary Gygax. Rest in peace.
The boat rocked as gently as a giant boat can rock when it's pushing 19 knots. A fresh breeze made small white caps in the sea. The sun — the Nerd's natural enemy — was directly above us in a cloudless sky.
I sat with Anne on the aft pool deck of the Westerdam, my feet floating in the water.
"It's amazing how just putting my feet in the water cools me down," I said. "I wish my heat sinks in Mechwarrior had worked this well."
She gave me a familiar look that indicated I'd traded English for a foreign language without warning.
"It's an old game I used to play all the time. Forget it"
She gave me a familiar look that indicated she'd already forgotten it.
Seamonkey Matt walked past us on the deck. A few days earlier, he'd asked me if I was interested in playing Settlers of Catan1 with him before the cruise was over. I told him that I was, but I didn't want to be inside when it was beautiful outside, and I didn't know if I'd have time. It turned out that, at this moment, I had time, and we were already outside where it was beautiful.
"Hey, Matt!" I called out, "want to have that game of Settlers now?"
"Yeah," he said. "I'll go grab it from the game room."
Aside: One of the greatest things about this cruise was the 24 hour game room, stocked with a library of games brought by Sea Monkeys that rivaled or exceeded the libraries I've seen at some conventions dedicated to gaming. I'm sure pictures of this game room will be published soon, and when you see it you will understand why I loved going in there so much. It was like Sea Monkey Headquarters, and there were always people playing games down there, having a fantastic time.
At one point, some Snorks2 attempted to invade the room, so a sign had to be set up announcing that it was a "Private Function." This sign was immediately anagrammed into several different phrases, my favorite ones involving Pirates.
A few minutes later, Matt returned with Settlers in hand. We found a table that was protected from the sun, and began looking for group. I quickly found my son, Ryan, and asked him to play with us.
"I've never played Settlers," he said.
"Yes you have. We played this all the time when you were little. You'll remember as soon as you see the board."
As we began to put the board together he said, "Oh, I remember this. Wood for sheep!"
"Yep, that's the one."
We had three players and wanted a fourth. I looked up from the table and saw that my friend Stepto — formerly known as The Banhammer of Xbox Live — was passing by.
"Stepto! Want to play Settlers with us?"
"Sure!" He said.
We finished setting up the board, placed our initial settlements, and began the game. Like all Settlers games, the first few rounds involved many fruitless efforts to acquire wood and brick, but eventually we settled into a pretty good game. Stepto and Ryan began competing for the longest road, and Sea Monkey Matt and I began a minigame involving screwing each other relentlessly with the Robber.
After about 40 minutes of play, we were all separated by two points, with Sea Monkey Matt in the lead. Stepto had run his road into a circle, and Ryan was ruthlessly chipping away, one segment at a time, until he achieved and kept the longest road.
It was Ryan's turn, and he rolled a seven, which allowed him to move the robber. Stepto and Matt had cities on one of the elevens, which I think made Ore. Ryan wanted to screw Stepto and steal from Matt, so it was a logical place to move the Robber. Ryan moved the Robber, stole a resource from Matt, and then traded that resource back to Matt for whatever it was that he actually wanted.
"I'm proud of your evil, my son," I may have said, in a Darth Vader voice.3
The dice were passed to me, and I rolled an eleven. I should point out that not a lot of elevens had been rolled, because it is only rolled 5.56% of the time.4
"Oh, come on!" Matt said.
"Seriously?!" Stepto said.
"It sucks to be you guys," I said. "I have Sheep for Ore… anyone want to trade me Sheep for Ore?" I took an Evil Wheaton Pause™. "Oh, I'm sorry, it turns out nobody has Ore but me right now, so I guess I'll just trade it to the box for Wheat."
"It's ironic that I don't have any Wheat at all," Ryan said, "Considering our name and all."
I smiled. Ryan doesn't know it, but when he calls me his father, or makes any reference to being proud of his name — he changed his name to Wheaton when I adopted him — I get something in both of my eyes, probably from my heart growing three sizes and pushing leaky emotion fluid out of them.
I passed the dice to Stepto. "It is your turn, sir," I said with a flourish for some reason.
Stepto rolled an eleven.
Before any of us could say or do anything, Sea Monkey Matt held his hands up to the heavens, looked across the table at Ryan, and shouted, "WHEEEEAAAAAATTTTOOONNN!!!!"
A very small group of Sea Monkeys had gathered around us, and were watching us play. They all laughed. Ryan laughed. I laughed. Stepto laughed.
I said, "that was awesome. I hear that reference all the time, but that's the first time I've heard it in reference to a different Wheaton than me, and in context, no less."
I high-fived Ryan. "The world needs more Evil Wheaton," I said.
"I'm working on it," Ryan said.
The game ended shortly after that. I got stuck at nine points, and Matt finally got his tenth point one round before I could catch him.
I was glad that he won the game. Matt didn't know it, but by making that reference, in an entirely appropriate context, to my son who took my name, was the highlight of the entire game for me. It was easily one of my top five awesome moments on the whole cruise, and maybe even number one.
1. The Settlers of Catan is a fantastic German-style boardgame, and it is our generation's Monopoly. If you haven't played it, I can't recommend it enough. In addition to the traditional tabletop version of the game, it's on iPad, iPhone, Android, Xbox Live, and PSN.
2. Our code name for the angry, entitled, complaining octogenarians who meandered all over the boat.
3. This didn't really happen, but wouldn't it have been awesome if it had? Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, Writers.
4. Pushes glasses up.
