The Player of Games

Hi.  Having carefully engineered this blippiversary to occur on the right day for completing 10 years, I thought I'd better do something distinctive with it.  

No idea if #BCIntroduce is still going as such, but this is me: Kevin, Cheeseminer, former software engineer & project manager now a B&B proprietor. 60-something (errm, yeah, fairly sure that's it), married 30-something years, three amazing adult sons: Software Developer, Ecologist, and Artist/Animator. It was the Software Developer who introduced me to Blip, one Christmas a decade ago. 

Anyone who's ever clicked on the #boardgame tag will have found me, in spades. Boardgames are a weird topic.  People either assume you mean Chess, Go, etc. or Monopoly, Cluedo, etc.  Thankfully, the hobbyist boardgame has made huge leaps and bounds over the last 25 years., and the stack behind me is but a miniscule sample.

I liken the development of boardgames to that of cars.
  
Consider Monopoly; 1935; the Austin 7.  

Any modern car is the same as an Austin 7 (4 wheels, same general structure, does the same job,...) but, whereas everyone acknowledges that cars have moved on a bit since 1935, most are surprised that boardgames have too.  'Driving' a modern game is a much more elegant and pleasurable process, and you'll get to the end a lot quicker.

For the avoidance of doubt, the mug in the blip is intended as a joke :o). Monopoly was designed (and not by Charles Darrow) to be an unpleasant experience; to illustrate the negativity of rampant capitalism.


For nigh on 30 years we had safe, comfortable jobs in Cambridge, raising kids, living in an obscene house market. But then that hankering that Elizabeth and I had, to 'do something different when the kids grew up' took hold, and we tossed all that safety to the four winds. 

We needed hills.  We needed away from Upper Management Faff.  We started hunting for something like a B&B.  You know, something small; a quiet and relaxed lifestyle.  Blip tracked this journey - enigmatically so, given that my then boss was reading my blips at the time!

So, seven years ago we fell in love with the biggest enormous big thing.  Twice our budget.  Garden a mess. Roof slates dropping like... roof slates drop.  £1000 pcm gas bills.  Hills on the doorstep. We sunk absolutely everything into it. Our combined annual income swung from substantially positive to interestingly negative; and we love it.


Not only but also:  Black belt in Wado Ryu Freestyle and Shotokan styles of karate - now embarking on Classical Wado Ryu training. Garden Railway modeller at 16mm:1ft scale. Occasional woodworker. Quaker. Science Fiction reader, with a full collection of Iain M Banks - including (unexpectedly, 2 copies of) The Player of Games.