What games do you play with your significant other?

Once per week we go behind the bar at Apathy Games and discuss gaming in more personal terms and ask you to respond. The best response will be featured the following week.

As we mentioned last week our weekend took us to a home coming of sorts at PAX: Prime.  Where we spent a weekend hanging out with the coolest group of people around, and playing Duke Nukem.  Yes, pigs were spotted airborne around the expo hall.  It was told it took the Enforcers (the volunteer staff of the convention) hours to clean up after they were done.  Don’t let anyone lie, pigs are messy.

Between awesome panels, musical guests and the best D&D GAME EVER (hopefully a full length video will be released soon) there was a small panel by one of my favorite writers (that’s right, writer) Wil Wheaton.  He recounted a story that I think is best left to his own words.

My wife likes scrabble and trivia games, both of which I’m terrible at.  Yet I still play some games with her, cause as much as I hate it, I love playing games with her.  I’ll never get her to play a game of D&D or Savage Worlds.  The idea of playing Settlers of Catan is so foreign to her that she bought it for me cause she knew I’d like playing it with friends.  My wife is awesome for not only putting up with my gaming habit, but for occasionally kicking my ass at other games.

Now Your Turn: What games do you play with your significant other?

Leave your story in the comments, and next week we’ll post the best story. If you have any questions you’d like us to answer in a future Behind the Bar, let us know.

Last Week’s Winner is: David

My favorite game system of all time is EarthDawn. I played EarthDawn almost exclusively from 1994-2002. While some people I have known found the system odd and difficult to learn, EarthDawn unleashed my creativity.

Instead of classes, EarthDawn uses Disciplines, and the core abilities of the Disciplines are embodied in Talents. These talents are magical in nature, so that every character, in effect, is magical. Magical powers is no longer restricted to those who cast spells.

Each Discipline is also an outlook and a way of life. An Archer is not merely someone who wields a missile weapon, but someone who thinks of life in terms of targets and the best way to reach them.

Magic items are not merely things that have powers, but complex patterns of powers that characters unlock by studying the item, gaining knowledge of it, and perhaps by performing deeds.

These things, and others, are embedded into the game. Even writing this, it can be hard to describe why the game has such an appeal to me. But I can say this: everything I do and create in roleplaying, even now that I seldom play EarthDawn, is influenced by the years I played this game. All of the writing I do for White Haired Man in heavily indebted to EarthDawn, and I’m sure someone experienced with EarthDawn would notice this.