What makes someone who they are? Do you mean besides your parents? Your friends, that’s who. My mom always said, “Show me your friends, and I’ll show you what you’re made of…” At some point in your life, your friends really start to have an impact on you and what you like. You begin to share experiences, and those shared experiences begin to shape the person that you become and create the bonds of friendship. For me, one of those things that I liked to do when we (my small sphere of friends) were in Junior High school (what you may think of as middle school) was play board games. Not the crappy, run of the mill, board games. Ones that boys like – ones that make you have to think and aren’t common. Like Stratego or Risk (yeah, I know they are still somewhat common)! Then, when we hit 8th grade, we’d race home after school and bust out the board games and play until dinner time. Yeah, nerds in training. Now, Jack and I lived about a block away from each other, and my buddy Bob, lived a block further than me. Bob never raced home since I think he went to chess club after school and besides, his mom made him take the bus. But Jack and I always made a race out of getting home first and see who could call who first. Come freshman year in high school, we graduated to more difficult board games that made you use your imagination and creativity like Tactics-II, Fight in the Skies, and Third Reich. These games of course, were pre-computer because although around that same year, my buddy Jack got a TRS-80, and we started to learn the “BASIC” language and its rudimentary computer graphics commands and my interest in electronics and computers was born. I’ll talk about the other various games that I have in the next adventure…
-Mark