Welcome to Board and Caffeinated! This site is the start of a personal journey of mine. As you can see, I have two major interests in life, games and coffee (of course my wife and kids too!). With that said, I intend to dedicate time towards at least one of these interests here — games. Although, I might begin to dig into coffee and the coffee business at some point.

Early Years of Gaming
I have been designing games since I was a kid. I use to have a spiral bound five subject notebook where I would keep my ideas. On several occasions, I would write to companies like Hasbro and Parker Brothers of ideas that I had. Unfortunately, I would get a reply email… “No Unsolicited Materials Please!”

In seventh grade, I won a holiday contest and earned free homework passes with “Crazy Christmas Shopping”. About that time, Flipsiders came out which I loved and and even designed an additional dozen games using that as the engine for the design. I loved game design as a kid!

College Years of Gaming
During my college years, board games moved to the back burner. In fact, I played very few games when I was in college and if they were, it was more party games such as Taboo and Pictionary.

The Plunge into Designer Games @ Purdue University
At the tail end of my tenure at Purdue University (2002), Chad Barnes invited me to his house to play Eurogames. I said, “Euro-what?” That was the beginning of the end. We played Settlers of Catan, then Carcassonne, and Bohnanza. It was awesome. I began to collect Eurogames, and managed to get all of my old games from my house and combine them with my new Eurogames. It was total awesomeness! However, in December 2002, I left Purdue and headed back east to the DC Metro Area. Board gaming would have to go on hold.

The Journey East
Once I moved out East, I needed to find a job. I applied for various technical jobs in the area. In addition, I started to work at the Game Parlor in Woodbridge. It was a great experience and introduced me to lots of games and people. I picked up miniature wargaming for the first time through playing Warmaster.

While playing Warmaster, I met a guy named Dennis who put me contact with a gaming group that met on Wednesdays in Fairfax, VA at The Little Wars game shop. There I met Randy, Terry, Dan, and John. We played board games and miniatures. From there Terry introduced me to Historical Miniature Wargaming. We attended HMGS Fall-In conference located in Timonium, MD. There I got to play a lot of miniature games and met Trent (who wrote Warbirds in Miniature), John Stanoch (Blue Sky), and Mark Fastoso (Skirmish Campaigns: Vietnam). Mark was local to us back in Annadale and we wound up playing miniatures over at his place. There I met Ed Stewart, CB Stevens, Scott Fischer, and Doug Austin. We gamed on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Hence, there was a point where I was gaming multiple times in the week. It was great. In addition, I landed a job at GWU and began to expand my collection.

To be continued…