wanting to play Keyforge

I’ve recently followed a couple of bots on Mastodon that promise to show “Random Magic: The Gathering Cards” or “Every Pokémon Card.” Following both of these reminds me how much I like trying to think through how the unique abilities of different cards (or miniatures, or whatever else) can be combined to win a game. The last time that I’ve really scratched that itch was when I was in grad school and got really into the X-Wing Miniatures Game. After spending a ton of money on the First Edition and realizing that I still wasn’t great at the game because I couldn’t be bothered to follow “the meta,” I got disillusioned when the Second Edition came out and made all my purchases semi-obsolete and the little skill I’d built up totally obsolete.

Thinking about all of this makes me think about how I’d like to get into the Keyforge “unique deck game” that captures everything I think is fun about these kinds of games but also drastically reduces the cost (in dollars or investment in a metagame) that it takes to get involved. My brother owns a starter set, and I’ve played half a game with him; sometime after that, I bought my own starter set and have played one game with him. Since then, a new semester has started and reminded me how much time I spend at work and with family, and why it is exactly that I’m not really invested in any gaming hobbies these days.

So, yeah. I really want to get into Keyforge, but as much as I tell myself that it’s healthy to have hobbies, I just don’t know if I have the bandwidth for it right now. I’m glad that there are Mastodon bots to give me a tiny taste of that sort of thing (just like how I’m glad that there are train-focused accounts to bring small bits of joy into my rail desert life), but I wish that weren’t the limit of it.

• macro
• Myself
• card games
• tabletop games
• board games
• Keyforge
• Pokémon TCG
• Magic: The Gathering
• X-Wing Miniatures Game
• Mastodon