Growing up in Alaska, my family often lived in houses with a woodland backyard (avoiding the monotony of suburbia), and my brother and I would often find ourselves outside running through the woods or making half-assed treehouses, ya know, kid stuff. When we stayed inside, we would often create huge battles and races out of Hot Wheels or action figures, and they could be somewhat intense. I remember one argument my brother and I had over our toy cars (who had the faster one) that led to me being hit in the eye by a thrown toy and having to wear an eyepatch for about a month.

However, a particular favorite game of ours was to play with toy army men. We were never content to visualize the battle (it led to too many disagreements), so my brother and I figured out our own way of playing the game where casualities were definite. My brother and I would each choose a side and then build up our armies about 10 feet away from eachother. We did our best to make it look realistic; we would have all the "charging" army men out in front, leading the assault, and line up the shooting infantry behind them in rows. Finally, if we had any artillery we would set those behind our lines, creating an army of anywhere from 50-100 guys in what we thought was battle formation. Then my brother and I would sit behind our troops and, armed with a rubber band, trade off shots at the other's army (I like to think of it as my first experience with turn-based combat). We didn't have a lot of rules, but we didn't need a lot of rules; whoever got knocked down was killed. If we shot one guy and he flew backwards, knocking down a row of men, then they were all dead. The hardest guys to kill were invariably the men lying down; sometimes it was difficult to decide whether or not they'd been hit, because even if you nailed them with a rubber band they would sometimes not move. We often would play this game with a plastic mountain that came with one of our army men sets, and that was always a lot of fun to use; hitting guys became even more difficult when you added a second axis, verticle as well as horizontal. THe only problem with that was sometime if you hit the mountain hard enough, all of the men would fall down. It was a rare occurance, but worth a gamble; many times I would pull the rubber band to the point of snapping, frustrated and just trying to hit the damn mountain as hard as I possibly could. Needless to say, when all the men on your side where knocked down, the war was over. I guess, looking back, this was kind of a segue into the world of video games for both of us. When you boil it down, a lot of games we have played since are just more complicated versions of the same thing.