Magic: The Gathering
For those of you that know me, you know that I've very defensive of Magic: The Gathering. I'm a big fan of strategy games and of all the games I've played, including chess, this has been most exciting and challenging. Before you pass it off as a child's game I remind you that the game was invented by a grown man (Dr. Richard Garfield a former professor of combinational mathematics) and the average age of players of the game ranges from 18 to 21.
For those of you who don't know much about it, M:TG is a collectable card game where each player creates a deck of cards from their collections and play against each other until one person wins. I won't get into the details of how the game works, simply due to the fact there I don't have enough room. The game was created in 1993 in a basement and now is produced in 10 languages with players competing in tournaments worldwide for less than paltry cash prizes.
The game requires a rather high level of thinking similar to that of chess (multi-move planning, defensive/offensive strategy, etc) however it has the additional difficulty of not knowing anything about what the other player has. With tens of thousands of different cards printed, it is difficult to even recall possible options to consider.
This game provided me with the majority of my logical and strategic planning skills that I possess.
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