Hello there wonderful World of Warcraft Trading Card Game fans. My name is Ben Cichoski and I am a member of the R and D team here at Upper Deck for the World of Warcraft TCG. I was the lead designer for the Hunt for Illidan expansion (I hope you like Sextuple Wield). I have worked on each WoW product since Through the Dark Portal.

As you know, if you have read the other Roll Call blogs, we have been asked to describe our journey to R and D. So here it goes. (A word of warning, this is a bit of a love story.)

I have been making games, either on my own or professionally, for the last 18 years. I made my first game when I was 14 and haven’t really stopped since. For many years, games were the first thing I thought of in the morning and the last thing I thought of at night. I just couldn’t get enough. I made, bought, and played as many games as I could and even studied the history of games. Then I met my wife, Gwenn.

Although games still played a part in my life, my priorities changed. I moved to Vermont, started thinking about marriage, children, buying a house, you know – adult stuff. I still tried to play games as much as possible, but they became more of a hobby than a passion. Then at a mutual friend’s wedding, my college buddy Danny Mandel (you know him as the Godfather of the World of Warcraft TCG) gave me some very early VS demo decks. He explained the rules, we shuffled up and played.

Now, I had played lots of other TCGs before. But this was different. This was a game a good friend of mine had made. This was real. Seeing those cards and holding them reignited the passion.

I dusted off some game ideas and got back into the groove. Now the first thing I thought about when I woke up was Gwenn. But the last thing I thought about as I went to sleep was games again.

I am not sure Gwenn knew what was happening. She was aware I had this cute thing about games, but she had never seen it like this. I started working at 2 different game stores to try to immerse myself in games as much as possible. There were half-finished prototypes, game boards, decks of cards scattered throughout our apartment. I worked on concepts late into the night and tried many of them out on her the next morning. Or on my parents, my brother, my friends.

Eventually we got married. After a wonderful honeymoon, we returned home. About a year or so later, we started talking seriously about kids. Gwenn got pregnant somehow and we were expecting our first child to arrive in March 2006.

This was in July 2005 or so and it was perhaps the critical moment in my career. You see, Danny and I had always talked about me coming to work at Upper Deck but just in a pie-in-the-sky, wouldn’t-it-be-nice sort of way. I started wondering if this was my last chance to make it more than that. Then I brought it up with Gwenn. She said, “This is your dream. I will go anywhere you need to go.” This is how lucky I am.

So I called Danny and asked how it would work. I had to convince him I was serious. After I did, he told me he couldn’t just snap his fingers and get me a job, that I would have to earn a full-time position. That was just fine with me.

Needless to say, this was a very intense time in my life. I moved to California, leaving my pregnant wife behind for four months. She did visit me and I went back home as much as I could, but I was also trying to make the best impression possible at Upper Deck. I worked on a variety of games; including the Pirates of the Caribbean TCG (my first credit), then a game called Kiba (it launched in Japan), then the Wow TCG. Somewhere in there, I had a little boy, and we all moved to San Diego. And here we are.

To sum up; yes, it’s important who you know, but it’s also crucial that you love games, have a family that is amazingly supportive and you must be willing to take a chance.

By the way, I still have those laser-printed VS cards Danny gave me. Every once in a while I take them out, shuffle them, and deal myself a hand.