Board and Card Games

I have played a lot of D&D in my younger days. It sort of fell through for the time being since I have to work on internship and I'd much rather play Dungeons of Dredmor instead. I've also played a lot of classic board games like checkers, monopoly, Life, and so forth. I can also play a mean game of chess (or it's just that my opponents might be too dumb.) I won the school chess trophy in our last year of the same by spamming Scholar's mate until the semis and finals. derp.

 

I'm a 7th kyu Go player... or was when last I played, I may have droped a stone or two from lack of practice.

Scholar's mate spamming? ROFL. You really didn't have much competition then.

 

With how many people play chess nowadays, it's sometimes really hard to get someone to play with, and that means people don't get versatile enough not to lose against something like that.

 

Try finding some decent Go players in your local area... chess has it good by comparison.

Last time I played I had to give my opponent 9 stones in handicap, and it still wasn't even close. 20+ point win. If I want an even match I have to play online.

 

I haven't played a lot of chess in years and years, but my young nephew recently started playing the game a lot, and loves playing with me. I try to give him tips when I can. One of my big problems is that at some point in any game, I'm bound to lose focus and make some really horrible blunder. One person who played me said of my play style that I "thrive on chaos" in that when I got lost as to what to do, I would always select to complicate things even more.

I was never really all that serious about the game -- but I had a friend who was the state (NY) champion in his age group (Jr. High, or high school). I used to be in a chess club with him at my local Synnagogue, and he would beat (ie. totally humiliate) the instructors in the club (which was ok by them). He tried to encourage me to go to tournaments with him -- he thought could probably take second or third at some of the smaller tournaments, but I never really wanted to. I had some natural talent but I knew I didn't want to invest the kind of time and effort it would take to get decent.

My college (Caltech) had several really good chess players, and nearly all of them lived in the same dorm with me, or would visit my hallway in Page House to play (where maybe 4 out of 5 of the best of them lived). Mostly people played speed chess, or team chess (I got thoroughly hooked on team chess, aka bughouse chess, aka siamese chess), and I introduced the game to co-workers at one of my first programming jobs and got THEM thoroughly hooked on the game as well. You can think of it as speed chess on steroids, with a huge twist.

We beat M.I.T. in a chess tournament about a year or two before I was a freshman there). We tried to play them at football when I was there,, but they couldn't even manage to gather a team. An M.I.T. cartoonist dubbed the never-to-happen game the "Nerd Bowl".

 

I'll raise you a game if you want it, how and when shall I arrange to play one?

 

What version of Windows or other operating system do you currently use? depending on that I can arrange a game using just the base software included in the OS package.

 

play by post? I can arrange that if you like. We had great fun in school playing chess using pen and paper and a 64-grid hand-drawn board.