remembering redemption (1)
Friday, 2 October 2009
I imagine that this will be the first in a series of posts.
I’ve been playing a bit of Magic: The Gathering since late June and it has brought back a lot of memories of my days as a lonely player of Redemption. Back in the late ’90s – early ’00s I was seriously into Redemption. At least, as seriously as one could be when I could never find anyone to play with. I collected the cards, organized them into a huge binder decorated with hand-drawn illustrations of Calvin & Hobbes and religious imagery, spent many an evening struggling through the arcane deck-building rules, and tried to find people to play with.
There was a brief period when I was able to teach the Ski boys (who we lived with for a month) how to play, but after a few days we were distracted by the greater joys of Risk. My parents, Lord love ‘em, humored me with attempts to play, but it was not their style of game. Dad was a chess man, with the occasional game of “Go Fish” thrown in for variety. Mom preferred checkers and American Heritage Monopoly. Neither of them seemed to enjoy the complexity of “rescuing lost souls” and managing carefully banded heroes and “evil characters.” Twice I met people in Scouting who played, but one moved a month after we met and the other had given up playing several years before when the convoluted rules got to him. We played a couple rounds, but quickly gave up.
I still have my Redemption cards. The binder hasn’t been opened in months, and I don’t think I have opened up the large felt sack of constructed decks in nearly two years. Were it not for the cards being in storage a few miles from here, waiting for an upcoming move to be completed, I would dig them out tonight and take a little trip down memory lane.
Once I have finished settling in to my new abode, I’ll dig out those old cards and take a look at them. Perhaps I’ll scan some in and use them to augment an article or two. Now that I’m occasionally dabbling in collectible card games again, I have an urge to re-examine Redemption and try to figure out how good it really is.