Friday Night Shots – Lifestyle Games

Lifestyle games

What does that mean and are you into them?

At Bottoscon (not just last weekend, but every time, along with Terminal City Tabletop Convention as well!), a dedicated group of gamers play nothing but 18XX games.

(18XX games are train games where you are building train routes around the area the game is about and with years in the 1800s, like 1830, 1846, 1862, 18MEX, 18HOWMANYGAMESARETHERE, etc, and you are also investing in companies and stuff like that)

I look at these guys who show up bright and early on Friday morning (or Thursday morning for November’s convention), all set to go, with four or five different games ready to go, all in the same series, and they are doing that all weekend.

It made me stop and wonder, not just about conventions, but also about games in general.

This is the very definition of a lifestyle game, where that is basically all that you play.

Sure, you can play a few other games here and there for spice.

My friend Tony is one of these 18XX players and he’ll occasionally join us for a game of something else.

I really can’t imagine spending a whole weekend playing one series of games.

Yet people do!

Maybe my lack of imagination is because of the subject matter.

These games just seem so dry and boring to me, though I know people who love them to death.

But what about game systems like Advanced Squad Leader?

I loved Squad Leader back in the day, and as I mentioned in my “How I Became A Gamer” post, I started investing in Advanced Squad Leader superseded it.

Yes, that is the link to just the rulebook, which can cost upwards of $90 by itself!

It’s a 3-ring binder with a ton of pages of all the rules for the basic game.

Each big module that adds nationalities adds its own pages to this rulebook, so it has to be a binder so you can seamlessly add them.

Beyond Valor (the 3rd edition) is the first module with the Germans and Russians, and it’s currently on the MMP web site for $145.

Yikes!

I had both of those, as well as the Paratrooper module that was smaller and had US Paratroopers (the rest of the American forces were introduced in Yanks).

I had to sell them when I moved to the west coast, which made me sad.

Now, the system is so huge, with a large number of modules adding different nationalities, plus scenario packs and everything else, that I don’t know how you keep it all straight.

The system is complicated enough that many players have this game as their lifestyle game.

Thus, a “lifestyle” game can either be multiple games in a series (like 18XX) or a gaming system where there are tons of scenarios to play.

Combat Commander hasn’t reached that point yet, but it’s also a lot simpler so maybe doesn’t require that lifestyle label?

Because another thing about lifestyle games is that if you don’t continue to play them, it’s very easy to get too rusty at them and forget a lot of what you know about how to play.

Sure, that can happen with other games too, but I think it’s even more of an issue when things are super-complex already.

For ASL, they do have the ASL Starter Pack options, which can give you a taste of the game, though it is just a taste.

There are a lot of rules apparently left out of the Starter Packs, but they’re a good way to get an idea if you want to take the plunge.

Because it is a plunge!

For me, I think I would have trouble limiting myself to so few games.

As I’ve mentioned before (most recently when talking about long versus short games at conventions ADDLINK TO THAT POST WHEN IT’S LIVE), I really enjoy playing a wide variety of games.

Could I submerge myself into just one game (or game system) and not play too many other games?

Could I go to a convention and just play one game (in its different varieties) instead of playing a whole bunch of different ones with different people?

I’d love to learn Advanced Squad Leader (18XX, not so much), but I don’t know if I have the time to invest in it (and the money, if I did it myself!).

Do I have the mental energy to expend learning complex systems like that?

When I think of “lifestyle games,” these two systems come most readily to mind.

Is there a system or a game that you can think of that would fall into this category?

What do you think?

Are you one to immerse yourself into a lifestyle game?

Let me know in the comments.