While I do love UX with all my heart and soul, when I’m off the clock, I don’t like to work. With that said, I still love UX but in the form of a off-line table-top game called Magic the Gathering.

Being that I love to game and UX-around, I have been attracted to gaming offline. There are a lot of choices today (see below*) but the one that as a balance of game and UX has been a game called ‘Magic the Gathering’. It’s offline, so no screens. It has structure, but allows for a creative approach to game-play. You play your friends face to face, its really collaborative and becomes interesting as the game-state evolves and progresses with complexity.

Where’s the UX in Magic the Gathering? There is a base set of rules but each card that is played by an opponent has the potential to change the the rules.  No matter if you play 2 or 6 people, each game is different and unique. One UX part of MtG is observing the play-style of other players at the table, how they strategize. Players also will rely on their personal ‘color identity’ which dictates play-style. (see below)

Recently this year, I began playing a format called ‘commander’. Today, Commander seems to the popular version of Magic the Gathering. I have found a good group of people who play on Sundays at Upland Brewery – See you there!

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*The popularity of ‘table top’ gaming is trending up. What is table-top gaming? Its any game that is played on a table without a screen. Poker, Monopoly, Scrabble, Settlers of Catan, etc. The typical trend is that before kids have a job, a great deal of social interaction is online gaming.