Left to our own devices we often fall into a rut. We do the same thing, over and over again.

The thought of changing seems painful and hard work. Sometimes situations force us to do something in a different way and it’s great, we wonder why we didn’t make the change sooner.

There is a phrase in English: “A change is as good as a rest”. The thought of resting from gaming is a scary one for me, so let’s try a change!

Over the next 10 weeks I am going to challenge you to do something unusual with your gaming in the hope of making you see things differently.

For this to work, if you agree to accept my challenges, you must use the challenge for at least 50% of your playing time. Of course I can’t keep checks on you but try to not to cheat.

Each challenge will last one week and are not concurrent. That means that after you finish each challenge you go back to your standard way of playing and then apply the new challenge.

The challenges are all to do with how you play. I have not specifically chosen them with the objective of improving your playing standard, but you may finish the PlanetPhillip Challenge Series 2009 a better player.

The challenges are arranged so that they increase in difficulty. At least I believe they do, though some readers may find some challenges harder than others.

I have all ten challenges chosen but I would be interested to hear your ideas for challenges. I won’t be posting the list of challenges because I think it’s better to keep them secret until each one is published.

The challenges are all possible with Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One and Half-Life 2: Episode Two and their maps or mods. That said, some challenges may not be well suited to some maps or mods, in which case play as you normally would.

I suppose it’s possible to do the challenges with other games not in the Half-Life series but my instructions for implementing them will be for the above games, please don’t ask me for help with other games.

Obviously I will also be doing the challenges too and I would really like to hear your thoughts and experiences as you do the challenge. In fact, that’s a big part of the series, discussing the affects of the challenge on how you play and how well you play too.

I will post the first challenge tomorrow and every then every Wednesday for another 9 more weeks.

Are you up for the challenge?

• Challenge 01
• Challenge 02
• Challenge 03
• Challenge 04
• Challenge 05
• Challenge 06
• Challenge 07
• Challenge 08
• Challenge 09
• Challenge 10