![]() ![]() Tonight, I will go home and play something with that smell with my family. My own tales were building, with plot points spinning on the roll of a die. These things would take me away from the heat to far away places that I was part of. It wasn't the churning old air conditioner that made the nights bearable. Before the PC, before beautiful plastic bits in the games, before anyone knew how to edit rules in any decent manner. ![]() The smell of the cardboard and the tiny flimsy chits. I would introduce my brothers or buddies to some of the better games, but it didn't matter. There, on my bed, protected from the sweltering heat by a broken down air conditioner, I was gaming. Heart racing, I would stumble through moves as I read the rules, enjoying each word just as much as I did the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels I had started last weekend. This thing was a blessing as it held down the paper maps that came with most of the games I could afford from my own pocket. Somehow he had come across a piece of plastic, like a thin plexiglass. I'd unfold the map.ĭad worked in welding. Looking over the tiny numbers and glyphs, determining strengths and strategies. I would examine each counter in fascination. They all had the same smell of musty cardboard in wet air conditioned air. Aliens, monsters, bugs, space marines, barbarians and more. With a deep breath I knew the rest of the evening would be filled with unheard battle cries. ![]() It was impossible to remove, merely part of the fabric of the hobby. It was like tiny cardboard fuzz that collected in the corners of every box and bag these games inhabited. Tiny black silhouettes, predating fancy modern printing techniques, on tiny cardboard chits that seemed to shed the weirdest little paper dust. A smell that I had learned was the herald of great adventures. An aroma of fresh print, of cardboard, of musty paper. Suspended in that box, bag or pamphlet, there was the scent that hung heavy even over the scent of the air conditioner. I would lie on my stomach on my bed in the room I shared and open whatever the latest gaming gem was I had procured. It even turned out to be a better game than Demons anyway.Īnd there was a distinct smell to old air conditioning that was poorly maintained. As there was no internet to get rule books from and my funds were limited, this was nothing less than a golden treasure. Being there was a counter manifest on the back, I was able to make a home copy. Once, I purchased SPI's Demons, at Toys R Us no less, and through extreme luck got a rule book from DeathMaze accidentally included. I couldn't afford the bigger Avalon Hill games on my own, although my brother got me AH's Starship Troopers for Christmas. Classics like The Creature That Ate Sheboygan. SPI had some nice affordable games in real boxes, too. For a paper map, some monotone cardboard chits you had to cut apart yourself and an arcane rulebook in black and white which assumed a PhD reading level. Metagames, microgames, whatever you called them, usually ran around five bucks. Having just finished reading some Heinlein novel, it would be time to move on to other things.Ī trip to the now long gone Waterloo Hobbies during the weekend with some money earned from a good report card netted some new games. The living room and kitchen were just left to the heat. A big sky blue sheet hung across the hallway to keep the cool air confined to the three bedrooms. With two brothers and my parents there, this really wasn't enough. Only two older small ones for the whole house. We didn't have air conditioners in every room or anything. Dad wasn't going to stand over the grill in that heat and there's no way Ma was staying in the kitchen. It would be cold cuts for dinner since no one wanted to cook. And channel 13, which was public television, so we didn't count it. It seems every year the sun ruined a bunch, but she never stopped planting more.Īfter the reruns of Star Trek, there wasn't much else to watch, since we only got 5 channels. My big brother would be outside washing the Vega and Ma was lamenting what the sun would do to the tomatoes in the back yard this year. Because that new color one moved the black and white one into my mom's room. Back around 1979 during hot summer days that made the lemonade all the more sweeter and the water from the sprinklers all the more cooler, there were no home computers and there were no video game systems.Īt least not that my family could afford.
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