Richard Partin doesn’t have a Clue of the precise date he first realized he loved the Trivial Pursuit of board gaming.
He just knows Life is a Risk and to avoid Trouble, sometimes you have to please numero Uno.
“I’ve always enjoyed board-gaming because it’s so social and allows you to bring your own creativity to it,” said Partin, the coordinator for outreach and external relations at the School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, who edits board game rules in his spare time.
“I played all the usual board games as a kid,” he said, “but they kind of fell out of favor in the ’80s and early ’90s, with the rise of video games. Now they are making a comeback.”
Partin’s daytime job has him handling publicity and event planning for units within the School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
He also is in charge of organizing and carrying out May convocation details and is the editor of the school’s newsletter, which reaches 9,000 graduates.
“I like working on the newsletter because I’ve always been a writer,” said Partin, who worked from 1983-86 as the assistant director of public relations for Knox College and was editor of its alumni magazine.
From 1986-92, Partin was the director of Monmouth College’s sports information and news bureau divisions.
In 1995, he completed a master’s degree in history from New Mexico Highlands University and moved to the Urbana-Champaign area, where in January of 2002 he enrolled in the U. of I.’s English as a Second Language program in the Foreign Language Building. By December of 2004, he was working there, hired into a new position combining publicity, event planning and academic journal subscriptions.
“This is a very fascinating place,” he said of the Foreign Languages building, located on the Main Quad, which houses the speakers of 37 languages. “What we’re about is language and culture, and there are people here from all over the world. I’ve made so many friendships here, which continue.”
Partin’s immersion in Hispanic culture — his first wife was a native New Mexican — has broadened his horizons, but adaptation is not always simple, he said.
“It really takes time to understand and absorb another culture and its language, and it’s challenging to live between two different ones — in my case, between Latino and Anglo cultures,” he said. “In moving from New Mexico back to Illinois in 1995, it took me about a year to readjust into being in a predominately Anglo culture. The experience has served me well in relating to people of any or all cultures, and of course, that’s part of why I love working here.”
As for board games, he says he’s never outgrown them and loves sports-themed or low-complexity war or strategy games.
He started editing rules and game play as a side hobby after finding an online community of people who shared his love for board gaming.
Partin formed a friendship with an Italian game designer, Angelo Porazzi, after editing his game “Warangel,” a friendship that has led to family visits from both sides of the Atlantic. Partin took his family to Italy in 2007; Porazzi brought his daughter here in 2014.
“We found we had a lot of things in common and when we visited, we all hit it off very well,” he said.
Partin said editing a game involves not only grammatical issues but also paying attention to how the rules are phrased, presented and affect game play. He said little fixes can improve a game’s play dramatically.
He said most designers aren’t great editors, which is where his services come in.
“They really concentrate on the game play and the presentation of the game,” he said. “I think designing and editing are two different skills.”
He credits the game “Settlers of Catan,” created by Klaus Teuber in 1995, for leading the comeback in board game popularity. In the game, players take the role of early settlers who trade resources and race to build their settlements.
“It really rebooted the board-game industry,” Partin said.
He said the best board games are those that are simple to learn but demand great strategy to win.
“I think some people who don’t like board games are put off because they don’t want to learn a complicated or confusing game,” he said.
Despite the advances in electronic gaming, he said an alternative universe with board games at its center has continued to flourish.
“It’s still a very niche hobby, that’s for sure,” he said, “but there is a whole new generation of talented designers out there who are creating new games all the time.”
Partin was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, but grew up in Galesburg, Illinois, where his father was director of the Knox College physical education program and a longtime coach specializing in wrestling and football.
“I basically grew up on the campus of a liberal arts college,” he said. “It really influenced me a lot.”
Partin has been married for 17 years to Paula, who works with mentors at Champaign Unit 4 schools and previous worked in development at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. They enjoy taking trips together.
To relax, he hikes and plays handball, listens to jazz and classical movies, and strives to read as many as 25 books each year, most of them non-fiction. Right now he is reading I.F. Stone’s “The Trial of Socrates.”
He also is grappling with an invented game of his own and is play-testing a card game that, in homage to his father, has a wrestling theme.
“It emulates folk-style wrestling, which is the type of wrestling done in American high schools and colleges,” he said. “If any of the U. of I. coaches or wrestlers want to be play-testers, I’d love to involve them.”
