Welcome to Ludi Berkeley!

I've started a blog about gaming!

Before this, I'd been blogging in a personal blog, Isoceleria, for several years.  It started as a catch-all blog for random personal observations and opinions with exactly two rules: it was not allowed to devolve into a forum for personal drama, a la the Livejournals and Xangas that were popular during high school, and any opinions expressed were not to be of the political sort.  Eventually, Isoceleria became mostly about reviews of various media (books, TV, music, games, etc.) and the occasional personal narrative.

The frustrating thing about a personal catch-all blog, though, is that it's not necessarily about anything.  After seeing friends and family develop actual audiences for their blogs (like my mom's CraftyCat, about cross stitch and other crafts; or my girlfriend's Dynastea, about, yes, tea), I decided to try my hand at writing a blog that was legitimately about something.  I'm a grad student at UC Berkeley, studying chemical engineering; when I'm not killing bacteria with plasma, you can sometimes find me hiking, going to concerts, or eating crazy ethnic food.

But more often than anything else, you can find me playing games.  These days, it tends to be a lot of board games, in particular the "Euro" style ones, with a healthy portion of roleplaying games and a handful of video games thrown in for good measure.  And through all the hours I've spend gaming over the last few years, it's often occurred to me how often it would make compelling blogging: hilarious anecdotes, reviews, strategic dilemmas, ideas for new mechanics.

I plan to include most or all of that in this blog, on a level that can be understood regardless of if you're intimately familiar with a given game or have never even heard of it.  I'll also bring on some fellow gamers to contribute: Alex Harkey, who got me interested in Euro gaming in the first place and has designed some awesome mechanics of his own; and Josh Howe, who is responsible for organizing a lot of the gaming I do now and is fresh off a run doing some gaming blogging of his own, a column on Magic: the Gathering.

Look for a series of introductory posts explaining what sort of games we're into, followed by a hopefully regular series of posts about the games we're playing at the moment.  Hopefully it'll be entertaining and enlightening!