Looking through eBay, it’s always tempting to search for items lost in yesterday, gone missing somewhere in the period between childhood and adult life.
An odd example is this 1976 edition of a Starship Troopers tabletop wargame. I recall getting it second hand from a friend of the family sometime in the very early eighties when I was in my very early teens.
The game had a large map pasted to thick cardboard that unfolded to present a desolate land covered in hex squares waiting for any of the hundreds of little soldiers and alien warriors printed on cardstock squares with unit stats underneath their names. It was a very complicated wargame and came a game manual that was well over fifty pages of small print rules on every potential combat aspect.
I barely understood even a tenth of the game, and yet I would set up units on both sides and imagine interstellar wars in which entire empires were won or lost on the luck of die and a few well placed units.
Somewhere in a move I lost that game. Perhaps it’s in a box left behind in a forgotten corner of a forgotten garage where water has slowly eaten away at the cardboard and erased the ink labled stats.
It’s part of a simpler time, and part of a simpler me, and looking at those copies waiting to be bid on, it’s tempting to buy one and sit down and finally do another small bit of growing up by finally reading through that thick rulebook and using the experience and ability of being an adult to at last understand complex the rules of a game I had made so simple in my innocent youth.