David Hoffman

When I was a kid we each had our own rooms.  I’ve got two brothers and we were more or less allowed to spread out and occupy our own space.

My room was filled with toys and, later (though, not much later) with books.  Lots of books.  And lots of toys.

I think my most favorite(ist) toy was blocks.  And action figures.  I’d tell people I was going to be an architect when I grew up (before I was capable of comprehending how “architect” was less about stacking wooden blocks and standing a Captain America figure on the stack and more about doing a whole frigging lot of math and technical drawing and holy crap I’m falling asleep just typing this) but really it was less about building anything and more about playing with my imagination.

I read a lot.  I very clearly remember a friend of the family handing off a then-complete collection of Hardy Boys books (I grabbed the Nancy Drews when I’d finished with them).  In fact, my first actual, clear memory of deciphering a metaphor came from a Hardy Boys book: it was a description of one of the brothers, I believe it was Frank, and how his “fists were flying”.

I remember stopping cold, trying to work this out.  Please note I was VERY young at the time — as in, I only had one brother, Dan, who’s a drop less than three years younger than me, and not Matt, the “baby” who’s a month shy of seven years younger.

Flying fists.  Huh.  I’d seen some movies and television shows where giant robots could shoot their hands off like missiles to punch bad guys.  Was Frank somehow able to do this?  Didn’t add up to me.  Then I tried to process how else they might have meant it.  Eventually — and this could have been a period or minutes or hours — I think I sorted out that Frank was sort of . . . throwing his fists at the baddies.  Not literally, but I could imagine cocking his fist and then woosh there goes his fist and punching the villain in the jaw.

It made sense.  I kept reading.

I had a point I was getting at there.  Boy, I let myself get derailed.  Yow.

But!  I’m still on topic, even if tangentially so.

I had friends when I was growing up.  Some of them lived close enough for me to ride to their houses (when I was old enough that my folks would let me do this, of course).  And I’m the right age that I should have been playing stuff like Dungeons & Dragons, only the kids I was friends in didn’t seem to be terribly into that sort of thing.

I can remember receiving a Marvel Super Heroes RPG later in life and giving that a whirl, but I didn’t grasp the concept of “story hooks” quiet yet.  So I couldn’t get them to do anything but stand around waiting for someone to punch and never mind that the troublemakers were all there, only hiding out, invisible.  One of their characters could see invisible people — it said so right in the book! — but he refused to look around.

Anyway.  There’s some stuff I missed out on.  D&D was one of them.  Another was the original version of Steve Jackson’s Ogre.

In Ogre, one player is an army defending its base.  The other player is an ogre, sort of a mobile battle wagon about the size of an aircraft carrier.  Or possibly larger.  The ogre’s job is to destroy the base.  The other player’s job is to stop the ogre (you can shoot it’s four massive tank treads out from under it, stopping it cold, but that’s no mean feat).

In a lot of ways it’s a simple game.  In some other ways it’s complex, as one wrong move can really cost you the game.

Ogre has been out of print for some years now, but Steve Jackson Games is bringing it back.  They announced the game last year and a couple weeks ago they launched a Kickstarter campaign, both to gauge pre-orders and to see about improving the game through crowdfunding.

It’s been going like gangbusters.  As of this writing they’re a couple thousand dollars shy of $450,000.00.

Their goal was to raise $20,000.00, if you can believe that.

And the thing of it is: I’m on the fence.  I don’t have the nostalgia of playing Ogre when it originally came out (the original version was $2.95.  The current, Designer’s Edition starts at $100.00, though that includes shipping and a boatload of extras) so I don’t have a kneejerk reaction that I need to play this game from my childhood.  Oh Ogre, where have you been all my life?

But at the same time, it’s a hell of a production.

Would we play it?  The box is monstrous.  And we’ve got so many games, especially so many two-player games.

But at the same time, it’s a hell of a production.

I haven’t supported it yet.  I might yet hold out (might).  But I thought it was worth sharing.  It’s been written that writers enjoy great fan loyalty; if you write something which connects with your audience, they’ll stick with you through thick and thin.  They’ll remember you as the guy who gave them that experience right when they needed it.

I suspect Ogre is a similar thing.  For a lot of people that $2.95 game was a big part of their young lives.  They can recall with near-perfect clarity — or through the sepia-tinted lens of nostalgia, with perceived near-perfect clarity — “that one time” and “that game that came down to”.  Perhaps it’s the same for them as it was for me parsing Frank and the clear impossibility of his flying fists?  That seems reasonable, I think.

Here’s the video, from the Kickstarter campaign, describing the game and what they’re hoping to accomplish.  They’re well over their funding goal, so this isn’t a plea from me to you to support a worthy cause — it’s a game, for pity’s sake — but me sharing something which seems interesting and which, for a whole lot of people, is a step backward through the window of their lives.