A friend/coworker of mine and his wife hosted a weekly boardgame night that I attended. Most of the other guests were kinda flaky, and this one particular day, I was the only one who showed up. So it was just me, my friend, and his wife.
Someone suggested Dixit, which I had never played before, but it sounded fun and I was down to play. So we broke it out, shuffled, and started the game.
Now, if you don't know how Dixit works, it's basically a deck of cards with pictures on them. One of a toy abacus. Another of a child pointing a toy sword at a dragon. Another of a winding staircase with a snail at the bottom. Etc.
In one version of the game similar to Apples to Apples or Scategories, everyone gets a hand of cards which they keep hidden. The dealer announces a clue and everyone (including the dealer) contributes a card from their hands face-down to the center of the table and the dealer shuffles them together and reveals them all at once without revealing whose card is whose. Then players vote which one they think matches the clue. You get points as a player if others vote for your card or if you vote for the one the dealer picked. As a dealer, you get points if close to 50% of the players vote for yours.
I was the dealer this round. One of the cards in my hand was of a ship's anchor. That's when it came to me.
See, the friend/coworker and I both worked in web software development. His wife didn't. And I came up with the perfect play. I gave the clue "hyperlink." Hyperlinks on web pages are created using the HTML <a> tag. The "a" stands for "anchor." And any web developer would know that.
When the vote came in, I got one vote for my card from my friend and his wife failed to select the correct card and so didn't get any points. It was a slam dunk move. But I felt a little bad for excluding my friend's wife from an inside-knowledge thing.
The next round, my friend was the dealer and he picked a rule/card that was an inside-knowledge thing between the two of them. (A line from a poem they both knew well, the next line of which related to the picture of the card.) So I was glad of that.
I played standard tourneys from Shards of Alana until Rise of the Eldrazi! Then I made a legacy elves deck to smash randos for fun.
I played between 7th edition and Planar Chaos or Future Sight. Idk which one was later. Maybe some Ravnica stuff? I had a few 4th edition cards incidentally somehow.
Nice! I never played anything but casual until Shards… but I’ve got cards dating back to unlimited. Nothing super exciting, unlike my friend… who absolutely has power nine. I had been out of playing for a while and he’s like “yo check this out” and hands me a pile of old cards, not in protectors, just naked. Top card, Library of Alexandria. I was like “okay I’m guessing this pile is pretty spendy” and he informed me library was about a thousand USD.
Edit: Jesus… that’s gone up a lot. His is between lightly played and near mint.
Heh, don't remind me. I had like $3k retail worth of cards and sold them all to an upcoming card shop owner so I could afford to eat when I was homeless. After that, wizards went and power creeped and put in the village Planeswalker cards and suddenly MTG was less strategic deck building and more "buy the expensive and have better ramp." It's full-on broken now and I wouldn't go back even if someone bankrolled it for me. The game just isn't what I used to be obsessed with anymore.