Time & Perspective Quote by Fred Davis

Nostalgia can be disguised as logistics, and Fred Davis delivers it like a casual inventory: people played “both variants and regular games,” as if the split mattered less than the sheer abundance. The intent isn’t to argue for one “pure” form of play; it’s to memorialize a moment when the hobby felt borderless and self-renewing. “It was a period” has the tone of someone looking back at a boomtown after the gold rush moved on.

The subtext is a quiet defense of experimentation. Davis frames variety as normal behavior (“most people”), not fringe tinkering. That’s a cultural tell: variants aren’t portrayed as eccentric add-ons but as a shared language among players who wanted novelty, new rule sets, new social puzzles. In that world, “regular games” are the stable center, but they’re not the whole point; they’re the baseline you depart from.

The zine detail is the real engine. It locates this surge in an era of cheap, communal publishing where gatekeepers were minimal and enthusiasm was the distribution network. “Every week practically” isn’t just hyperbole; it captures the tempo of pre-internet fandom, where creativity arrived in stapled paper bursts and legitimacy came from circulation, not institutions. Davis is pointing to an ecosystem: play, invention, and publication feeding each other fast enough that the community could feel like it was inventing itself in real time.