There was a Wizards article talking about the three kinds of magic players: the Timmy, Johnny, and Spike. Timmy is your 8 year old player, who sees a BIG GIANT DRAGON and wants to play that AND BE AMAZING. Spike is the competitive one (can be jerk, can be nice but wants to win). Everyone in the banner picture above is…

Give in to your feelings and sign up for a draft. All the fun and none (well, less) of the time commitment!

That's really fascinating and I imagine is widely applicable (the guys who try too hard at co-rec softball etc.) I'm going to try to work "Levine Trench" into casual conversation this weekend.

Also to expand off @unexpected_dave:disqus, there are different ways of constructing the deck. There is the classic 'build from your own collection.' My favorite is drafting, where a table of 8 opens a pack, take one and pass it left. You're building the deck on the fly, trying to figure out what your neighbors are…

I… I play bridge and magic.

It was $10 a pack?! I was travelling so I missed the window but holy crap. Now I'm glad I did.

It's so cool that your mom took you to those events. I usually keep a few extra packs (my rare winnings) to give to the generous parents to give to their kids. There is no doubt that watching them open packs is 100x better than me flipping to the rare, grimacing, and tossing them in a box.

I think on this website, on this article, it's pretty much a mortal lock.

Oh man, that is terrible. That's just about the exact opposite of my experience with the scene, but I stick to the more casual formats of pre-release tournaments and drafting. I can see the excessive intensity ruining things in a real hurry.

Magic! A friend sucked me back into it a few years ago and now I draft once every few weeks. Credit to Wizards: they have made it really friendly for the weekend warrior types while still giving it enough depth to support the intensity of the tournament scene described above. For me, it's a great few hours with fellow…

It's funny as I started reading the art of war after getting hooked on the broderbund game "the ancient art of war" in glorious four color graphics. Then, at college ten years later, I learn it's been co opted by business bros. Or maybe always has been.

I would like to take a moment and pimp for Cyclades. It's a mythological Greek isles games where you struggle against other players to build Metropolis. What makes this game really fantastic is that it does the best job of keeping everyone in the game until nearly the very last turn. I've noticed that Settlers of…

Yeah, between this and Kotaku doing everything short of physically shaking me, I bought it and have been very very happy. So much fun!

A thousand times this. Go Irish and get a nice, firm grip of the mechanics on your remote isle.

Yes! I accidentally bought these as my first d&d books (instead of the core set) so I poured obsessively over the politics of the classical league of the minotaurs versus the undead hordes of thenol.

Lousy Smarch weather

Regicide Renegades… IN COLOR

A friend pulled me back in where I rapidly bumped against the "metagame/$$$" ceiling. But there's a brilliant solution: drafting! It's cheap, it's dynamic, it's pretty damn fun and it's 3 hours. At some point winning does require some metagame knowledge (ohhhh, minotaurs are good) but I heartily recommend it.

Very well put. I think sometimes my reading style undoes me on complicated fantasy where I look at a giant descriptive paragraph and go "whoa, that's a boring looking wall of text" and skip down to where someone is talking. Highly effective for Robert Jordan; perhaps less so for Erikson.

Coltaine's march was Deadhouse Gates I think. That was EASILY my favorite of the series. I think memories of that is what drove me through the rest of the series.