And that meet-up was to play the old Richard Garfield CCG, NetRunner. And it's nice to have a day like this to celebrate. I mean seriously, who else could have such a cool way to remember the very first time you met the person that you were going to fall in love with and eventually try to start a life with together? It just goes to show what common interests Tobie and I have, as somewhat peculiar and uncommon as they may be. And what better way for two geeks like us to finally find each other through a crazy, obscure card game, right?
And don't get me started on the geeky innuendo that we had going on that night. It didn't help that Runners "jack in" and some of the cards involved "worms" and "piledrivers".
And to celebrate NetRunner Night, I've dug up my original blog post about the night from the archives of my old blog, Beyond Dinobot Island. Here's the key excerpt for what it's worth. You can't really tell much about how I really felt after that night, but then the situation was rather complicated at the time...
Well, my night off from work was pretty enjoyable. After some back and forth during the week, Tobie and I had agreed to use my free night to hang out, drink a healthy amount of alcohol and to play some Netrunner - a classic CCG from the late 90's that allowed players to immerse themselves in the seedy universe of cyberpunk. Sure, we could have gone out for drinks or whatever but instead this sort of a sit-in night seemed more enjoyable. Besides, we had never actually met in person before and so this seemed like a better way of addressing that.
For the night I had ordered up a pizza for us and queued a fair number of downloads for the computer to work on while we'd be otherwise preoccupied. Strangely enough, I couldn't get my office webmail to work and so it looked like technology didn't want me working at all last night. At the very least, I kept my IM online and my mobile phone handy in case they needed me (and to assuage my conscience's work-related prodding).
Tobie arrived before midnight with beer and cards in tow and soon enough we set about opening the rest bottles, attacking the pizza and laying out the cards. After a brief review we gambled on the first game -he played as the Runner and I played as the Corporation. It took a while for me to really get a feel for the game again but this time around I won, which was fun of course. We changed decks without changing sides and this time I lost, but it was cool. It was just nice to play again. I can't believe how much I've missed card gaming and it was pretty interesting to play this particular game again.
I had first bought Netrunner cards back in grade school, but despite my enthusiasm for the game I never really got to play it much. It turned out that despite how cool I thought the concept behind the game was, not that many people shared that same enthusiasm. And thus I had all these cards and yet had no one else to play with. Bummer. The same thing happened to a few other CCG's that I had tried out like BattleTech and even Dune. At least for BattleTech, I eventually found someone to play with (and he totally kicked my butt time and time again as the Clans) but for Dune I was never so fortunate.
Anyway, the rest of the night was spent in conversation - as if there were moments of silence between two geeks. I'm glad I finally got to break the online barrier and meet Tobie face-to-face - we had a lot of fun and de finitely this won't be the last time we hang out for sure. Besides, we've only gotten to play Netrunner so far - now I want to get around to trying my hand at building a deck, hehe. And of course there are other card games out there to try and get into. =P
Well, work looms ahead. And frak it, we're out of coff ee.
Gah you made me blush at work. I love you so much.
ReplyDeleteMaking another run for your heart.