I am the wife of a gamer. 

Yes, that means I have been to a game store on a Friday night, I understand what a “sprue” is and what a “conversion” is on a figure.  I know that there are MANY factions of Space Marines (even though I tend to mix up their names when my husband talks about them) and that all pieces for a board game need to be very neatly organized in a board game box even if that means you have to make your own tuck boxes.  I know that anything, including an oddly shaped piece of mulch outside of Nordstrom, can become a base for a figure.  And that any container can be used to organized game pieces or “bits”. 

Must. Farm. Gold.

My husband wasn’t always a gamer.  He came out of the gaming closet in college after a trip to the comic store where he was reinspired by the comics of his youth, which lead to war gaming, his first attempts and now love for painting minis, and his uncontrollable urge for popping out the pieces to a new board game.   Sure, being married to a gamer has its good and bad points just like any hobby.  There are times when I don’t think he left the computer desk for days when a new version of WoW came out (yes, I know these acronyms!).   There was a while when he would go through “phases,” as I would call them, where he would try a new game or army and buy EVERY expansion possible for them…only to find out that either there was no way in hell I was going to play it,  or that we didn’t have ANY room for it in our tiny apartment and sold it all a week later.  There are a lot of things that a gaming wife has to understand.  Kind of an unwritten code to dealing with the hobby.  The hobby almost becomes an obsession which my husband has never thrown on me but has giving me opportunities to understand it.

Grandma's busting out the whoop ass--deal with it.

I was never one for games as a kid.  I was a dancer and gymnast and didn’t really have the patience to sit still and do anything let alone let alone play video games (didn’t have the hand eye coordination for that but that is another story) or to play games.  The extent of my game playing was Scrabble with my parents, rummy with my grandmother, and the occasional game of Monopoly against my sisters, which I always won by pure luck, of course! (Where’d you get the pink 50’s grandma?)

I think my first board game experience came with the game Ticket to Ride.  He brought it home after hearing about it from his friend who worked at a game store.  We played it and I discovered that I LOVE to compete against him!  It was a new thriving energy in our relationship.  It also helps that he has HORRIBLE luck with dice rolling.  Playing board games for us is a time to be unplugged from the world: from bills, work, friends, and drama.  It is just the two of us and a time for us to enjoy each other even during the roughest moments.  Since then, I have played MANY games!  I tend to enjoy the euro games (ones with wood cubes as I called them at first).  I also like games that are competitive in nature.  I’m not one for the cooperative games since I tend to blame everyone else if we lose!  I am willing to try new games but my lack of patience can be trying for anyone to teach me a new game, especially my husband, because it usually results in me accusing of him conveniently forgetting to teach me a rule.  

Despite my husband’s surreptitious attempts, I have not yet tried table top war games.  I think that this is because there is always a fine line that can be crossed in the gaming world from “geek chic” to the “escape pod of dorkdom,” and I fear that pushing around plastic army men force me across that line.  I think I am still like many others out there trapped in the stereotype that gamers are scary… even though I’ve learned over the years, they aren’t.  In fact, they are usually the nicest, most caring, and thoughtful people I’ve ever met… as long as they have gamer wives to pull them back into reality.

Editors Note: The WarGame Wife is a 20-something elementary school teacher that dabbles in gaming, and will assuredly be popping her tabletop wargame cherry at GenCon 2011.  Look for her running diary as she experiences her first gaming convention.