All my life I’ve been a gamer. I remember being five years old and my parents taking me out to Service Merchandise to buy me an Atari 2600 and a pile of games for my birthday sometime in 1980. At eight, I was already interested in role-playing games like STAR FRONTIERS and DUNGEONS & DRAGONS and throughout middle school I spent an inordinate amount of free time running elaborate RPG campaigns, playing through any number of classic NES games, or sitting around an eight hour game of AXIS AND ALLIES with my friends.

I moved on to more complex strategy games, like the classic Avalon Hill CIVILIZATION, and moving into the high school and college years I kept up pretty closely with the video game scene (I was even one of the 18 people who bought an Atari Jaguar) and I got involved with a little game called MAGIC: THE GATHERING for a while. I’ve owned my own hobby game retail business, earned international infamy by being the first user ever banned from Boardgamegeek.com, and written thousands and thousands of words on gaming and the gaming hobby in general. So that’s my resume for you guys who might be wondering who this Michael Barnes character is and what he’s doing here at GameShark—and why there’s so many dice laying around.

These days, I’m a bit of a gaming luddite; I’m a Mac user, so the most recent game available is Diablo II and I couldn’t tell you what the latest hot FPS is, although I do own (and adore) a Nintendo Wii. All of my gaming time, energy, and money is spent not on building up some MMORPG character or keeping up with what’s new on the PlayStation 3 but rather on board games.

I realize that a lot of people reading this, particularly younger folks who came along after online gaming and multimillion dollar blockbuster video game releases stole the thunder of the hobby game business, are going to see the phrase “board games” and be immediately put in mind of mainstream, mass market games like MONOPOLY, RISK, or (God help us) CRANIUM.

Yet, for the past decade or so board gaming has thrived, persevered, and made significant advances that gamers of all descriptions should be made aware of—if you’ve never heard of SETTLERS OF CATAN, which recently showed up as an Xbox Live title, you should start there. It’s a simple civilization building game that’s been around for over a decade now and is one of the most widely played hobby games in history. Sure, you can play it on your HDTV screen, but nothing beats the visceral thrill of physically playing the actual game with three friends—go on, try it. You’ll be surprised at how much fun you’ll have interacting and trading with face-to-face opponents; you’ll be surprised at the immediacy and excitement some cardboard and wooden bits can generate, and I’m fairly sure you’ll find yourself immersed in and addicted by the rich, deep gameplay that provides an almost perfect mix of luck, skill, and strategy.

Admittedly, it does seem a little odd to be advocating something as frankly old fashioned as board gaming, but I fully intend to use this column to share with the readers of GameShark a world of gaming they may not even realize exists.

For instance, you might be aware of the so-called “Eurogame” phenomenon that’s been going on for the past couple of years. “Eurogames” are fairly short (typically no longer than 90 minutes) non-violent games with a high degree of abstraction that are largely suitable for family play with often non-competitive themes such as farming or impressing authority figures with astute civic planning. Not the most exciting stuff, in my opinion, but there’s a huge market out there for them and there are some really great titles that deserve your attention that we’ll take a look at in future editions of this column. You may have heard of some of these titles like PUERTO RICO, CARCASSONNE (another recent Xbox Live addition -- ed), and TICKET TO RIDE through, ironically enough, digital incarnations of the games. Despite the relative popularity of the Eurogames, which tends to appeal to older and more processed oriented gamers like computer programmers and middle managers, I firmly believe that the resurgence of “Ameritrash” games, with their influences rooted in the hobby games of the 1970s and 1980s and bursting with baroque fantasy, science fiction, horror, and other pulp genre themes and featuring much more competitive and conflict oriented mechanics, are the best thing in town—particularly for the video game generation who would likely prefer to roll Panzers over a wheat field rather than plant one.

Games like those produced by Fantasy Flight Games- TWILIGHT IMPERIUM, ARKHAM HORROR, FURY OF DRACULA and TIDE OF IRON are sure to please lapsed board gamers who might have grown up on titles like TALISMAN, SQUAD LEADER or COSMIC ENCOUNTER and the immediacy, rich themes, and awesome scope of these games will likely impress even the most hardcore video gamer.