One of my earliest memories of boardgamegeek, was finding Isaac's Naaaame Gaaaame geeklist, which I thought was an absolutely brilliant idea.
He is a prolifc contributor, and his cartoon cat avatar will no doubt be familar to all of you. Amongst his wealth of contributions are 334 game images, many of which are very high quality.
These are just a couple of my favourites:
He is also the creator of the hugely popular generic geeklist, as well as many other excellent lists.
This is what Verkisto has to say about himself:
Verkisto wrote:
Like most Geeks, I started getting into games when I was younger. I can't remember whether my parents encouraged me in this area or my sister did, but I remember playing lots of games when I was a kid. Monopoly, Clue, and The Game of Life were certainly among the usual retinue of games, as were Othello, Yahtzee, and Payday, but we also played Mastermind, Careers, Inner Circle, Perfection, Slip Disc, and Gnip Gnop (possibly the loudest game EVAR, next to Boggle, which we also played). My grandmother helped encourage the hobby, as well, since the summers we spent at her house involved games like High Gear, Lie Detector, and Haunted House. So there were always games in my upbringing, though probably not as prevalently as they were in other Geeks'.
I had a great dearth of gaming between my childhood and discovering Eurogames about six years ago, and I went through a couple of bouts with RPGs, mainly Dungeons & Dragons and the James Bond RPG. But for the most part, aside from a rare game of Spades or Backgammon, I didn't play much outside of computer games during that time.
GAMES Magazine is what brought me full-force back into games. I had subscribed to the magazine for years as a kid, before they went bankrupt and ceased publication. A crossword bug bit me about six years ago, so I started subscribing again, and found an ad for Cheapass Games in the Halloween issue. The low price, the odd sense of humor, and the clever ideas appealed to me, so I started doing a lot of research into other envelope-game companies. Through that research, I stumbled across Lord of the Rings, the Knizia cooperative game. That was my entryway into Eurogames, and even though it turned out to not rock my boxers like I'd expected (it turns out that when your expectations are too high, the reality can only fall short of them, a lesson later reinforced through Canal Mania), it didn't keep me from trying a bunch of other games in the meantime.
If you're interested in reading about my two-year buying spree, my drought of gaming, or The Great Purge of 2004, check out my 3-Year Geekday Retrospective GeekList. That goes into much more detail than I could cover here.
I seem to have a preference for heavier games that reward good choices, but I don't do well at them. I tend to play from the gut, instead of developing a plan based on the game, so I don't always do well at them. In truth, I feel stunted as a gamer, which is possibly due to that dry spell of gaming during my formative years. Either that, or I really am ADHD, as I suspect, and just can't focus enough on the entire game to optimize my moves properly. With the heavier games, though, when I do win, the win is so much more satisfying knowing that it's based on the choices I made, and not necessarily on an opportune die roll. But I still love dice games, too.
Outside of games, I'm a librarian, a husband, a reader, and a dad to three cats. My wife and I are new homeowners, too, and we've been moved in for a little over a week. The new house has a room that will be my game room, so that's exciting! For the past year or so, most of my games have been packed up, so last week was the first time in a while that they've all been unpacked and available at a glance.
Two Truths and a Lie
1. I once sat in on a new writer's symposium that had, among others, Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison, and Clive Barker on the panel.
2. I learned to read when I was three years old.
3. I've been to Stephen King's office in Maine, and even sat in his desk chair.
I had a great dearth of gaming between my childhood and discovering Eurogames about six years ago, and I went through a couple of bouts with RPGs, mainly Dungeons & Dragons and the James Bond RPG. But for the most part, aside from a rare game of Spades or Backgammon, I didn't play much outside of computer games during that time.
GAMES Magazine is what brought me full-force back into games. I had subscribed to the magazine for years as a kid, before they went bankrupt and ceased publication. A crossword bug bit me about six years ago, so I started subscribing again, and found an ad for Cheapass Games in the Halloween issue. The low price, the odd sense of humor, and the clever ideas appealed to me, so I started doing a lot of research into other envelope-game companies. Through that research, I stumbled across Lord of the Rings, the Knizia cooperative game. That was my entryway into Eurogames, and even though it turned out to not rock my boxers like I'd expected (it turns out that when your expectations are too high, the reality can only fall short of them, a lesson later reinforced through Canal Mania), it didn't keep me from trying a bunch of other games in the meantime.
If you're interested in reading about my two-year buying spree, my drought of gaming, or The Great Purge of 2004, check out my 3-Year Geekday Retrospective GeekList. That goes into much more detail than I could cover here.
I seem to have a preference for heavier games that reward good choices, but I don't do well at them. I tend to play from the gut, instead of developing a plan based on the game, so I don't always do well at them. In truth, I feel stunted as a gamer, which is possibly due to that dry spell of gaming during my formative years. Either that, or I really am ADHD, as I suspect, and just can't focus enough on the entire game to optimize my moves properly. With the heavier games, though, when I do win, the win is so much more satisfying knowing that it's based on the choices I made, and not necessarily on an opportune die roll. But I still love dice games, too.
Outside of games, I'm a librarian, a husband, a reader, and a dad to three cats. My wife and I are new homeowners, too, and we've been moved in for a little over a week. The new house has a room that will be my game room, so that's exciting! For the past year or so, most of my games have been packed up, so last week was the first time in a while that they've all been unpacked and available at a glance.
Two Truths and a Lie
1. I once sat in on a new writer's symposium that had, among others, Neil Gaiman, Harlan Ellison, and Clive Barker on the panel.
2. I learned to read when I was three years old.
3. I've been to Stephen King's office in Maine, and even sat in his desk chair.
Let me start off with a few questions:
1) If you had to pick one "new to you" game of this year, what would it be and why?
2) Age of Steam is at the top of your top 10 and your hot 10.. as well as being one of only 3 games you rate a 10. Can you tell us more about why you like the game so much?
3) If you could only keep 5 games from your collection, but you knew that you'd always have exactly the right number of people to play them whenever you wanted to. What games would you keep?
4) You're in the book lovers guild, and have the microbadge too.. what would you say is your favourite genre, and can you tell us a bit about a favourite book.
5) I've been very impressed with the composition of some of your game photos. Is photography something that interests you outside of boardgamegeek?
(And my guess is that #2 is the lie)
Posted Sat May 10,2008 05:25 pm
About flippin' time! 
