Forest of Games

I'm in an Essen State of Mind

Essen season has come and is slowly fading. It’s a bit like the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament: a lot of people from all over poring over information as it comes out preparing for a big final weekend. In this case, though, there’s no competition beyond that of commerce. If you’re into board games, it’s a chance to see what the major—and minor—publishers are bringing out and to get a sense of where the industry is going, at least for another year.

 Generally, the industry is going with deck-building, dice distribution, and worker placement games. And this his hardly surprising: these have had the most successful titles over the last few years. Dominion, Kingsburg, and Agricola received a lot of attention around 2007, though the fervor attending those titles  has started to wane. The dice seem to be holding their own, though.

 Of course, it’s hard to know what ‘successful’ means when it comes to this niche. Ah, but that brings us back around to Essen Spiel (official motto: Komm, Spiel Mitt!). The organizers expected around 180,000 people to attend over the four days of the convention. That’s a lot of game and toy buyers.

 I have my eye on a couple of new games, and I’ve been intrigued by new game companies in China and Russia. Not because of their games, but because we haven’t  seen new titles from these countries recently. Mostly, the games look pretty awful (The Enigma of Leonardo has promise), but the new industry suggests how these countries view themselves. With their long cultural histories, I’m pretty excited about what they’ll be developing in the next few years.

 Here’s a quick hit on another trend to watch: higher player interaction (without fighting) in what are traditionally seen as Eurogames, and more resource management and worker placement in what are traditionally seen as Ameritrash games.

 In the meantime, I’ll marvel at the pictures from the Internationale Spieltage. So many people who think it’s OK to play.... Marvelous.

 

 

 

 

The Continuing Saga

We're starting to feel settled. A few Fairbanks game nights under my belt. Dana's been to several knit nights. Dana has a job, and we're starting to develop friendships, know the shopping options, and finish putting the house together. 

Plus: return to writing projects. 

I posted on the sister blog about place-based writing. But I started this blog space to discuss games and the 30 Days of Games project. I've been reading a lot--again, still--and just returned to the games essays about ten days ago. I realized-- But let me start again.

I had hoped that I could take the daily posts about games and combine them into a dozen or so essays. A little first person narrative, a little research, a bit of a struggle for insight, and we're done. And I wrote a few of those essays. After a review of that work, though, I've come to realize that I don't have a dozen or so essays. I have about three dozen essays. 

I've been working on the "family and gaming" question. That topic breaks up into about three essays (Dana's family history, my family history, our history together). Each of those issues explores how and why humans play games, and what's at stake in the play. The placement of the issue within the family group distinguishes it from broader issues of how and why non-related humans might play games with each other. You think you pick a nice, compact topic...

Does this sound like I'm grousing about this project? Ha! I'm delighted to find that I'm in a strong river. One that runs deep and has myriad tributaries offering intriguing exploration off the main current. Or, I'm delighted that I'm opening a box with a large board, lots of interesting pieces, good rules, and many useful strategies. 

Board of Alaska

How’s the board gaming in Fairbanks? Excellent question, and thanks for asking.

First, I’ll back up. It’s almost a commonplace that the internet changed the world, but for most of us —those who remember the pre-internet days—there are moments that underscore the nugget of energy that throbs within that observation. Moving to Fairbanks pulled the nugget out of the earth and gave me a shock. I’m really not sure where that metaphor is going, but there’s just enough logic there to sustain it. At least for this paragraph.

In an acronym, here’s what happened: BGG. Within a few days of arriving in Fairbanks, and updating my various online spaces to reflect my new location, I received a “geekmail” message on BoardGameGeek.com from Koldfoot. He invited me to a game night at his home, then a weekend game get-together over the Fourth of July, and I finally got a chance to attend a game night on a recent Friday. At the game night that I missed, he mentioned that a new board game enthusiast had come to town, and I had a message—on Geekmail—from a local guy, Mark, the next day. We’ve met, and Dana and I are taking our family over to their house for dinner tomorrow.

How’s the gaming? Good! The players in town seem to favor deeply strategic games (we played St. Petersburg and Parthenon on the one night I visited), and it looks like they favor a lot of player interaction. I can bring a lot of the more intense games off the shelf without worrying that the game might have too many moving parts—a worry that I had a couple of years ago, but that worry had evaporated by the time we were moving. In some ways, this is like stepping out of my old game group into a group that’s a only a little bit further along in terms of gaming intensity. I miss the familiar Lincoln personalities and faces, but I’m excited by the new group and the new games. 

 

Narrative of Games

A small post up on the Gaming Gang site. I'll post the basic stuff here, but click through to give the site some love. Also, I'm slated to co-host the podcast this fortnight. So look for that, too. Stay warm!

You slip a sharp blade between the box and lid to cut the shrinkwrap, pull the thin plastic off, open the box, and breathe deeply of the aromatic inks and glue. Ahh. Pop the pieces out of their frames, sort them by color and use, and settle down for a serious read with a new rule book. 

Life just doesn’t get any better, does it? Unless you add beer. But I digress.

Take a set of rules, the board and bits, set them up, have your gaming gang stop by, and you have what you need for a damn fine evening. But the question I have here is this: what’s the story?

I ask that question because I know—as a game reviewer and game explainer (I’m the guy hosting the game day, so I’d better be prepared)—that the first step to getting people interested in a game is to describe the game’s narrative frame. You’re all epidemiologists trying to stop multiple global disease outbreaks. You’re rats escaping the Titanic. You control this army as it moves across the checkered field to engage the other army. And so on. The game has a story it wants to tell.

Frequently, that story is the theme, and when we talk about how well the theme is implemented we’re talking about how well the storyline syncs up with the rules. Humans tend to like stories a whole lot more than they like arbitrary decision trees and operations (though we do seem to like those, too, or we wouldn’t have been gaming for as long as we have), so even a thin veneer of story helps to engage players. The story the game is telling influences design and marketing choices. I might not like managing resources in medieval Europe or the Industrial Age, but if we’re mining ore around Saturn, well, that’s a game I could play. With this level of story, however, the game exists as an abstraction. We look at the story, at the rules, and we’re either interested in playing—to some degree or other—or we’re not.

Once you’ve got the gang settled around the table and the pieces are out, you start a different story, though. This story relates closely to the story the game wants to tell, but now there’s a bit of separation. As the game is played, the story unfolds. It’s the story of the blue monkey opening the most cages, or the story of how my group of explorers picked up the most loot on the island. The game wants to tell a story, but the story of each playing extends—or changes, or subverts—the story that’s built into the game. This second level of story is where most of us decide whether or not we like the game. How did the story work, now that we’ve experienced it? Did the intersection of rules and story work? Someone might find the rules intriguing, someone else might find the completed story  compelling. And it’s this story that will be different every time. At least, you hope so. And you hope the story is different for good and compelling reasons. Randomness and luck work pretty strongly against coherent storytelling. Candyland, Sorry!, and Fluxx (among others) have their detractors because the story is outside of the player’s control. Deeply strategic decisions—or even meaningful tactical ones—let players build a satisfying story. And maybe a victory in the process.

And then there’s one more level of story, one that hardly involves the game at all: What story takes place among the players? This story is part of the meta-game, as some people refer to the time and space above the board and outside of the rules. Who sits down at the table? This might be the evening when your friend of ten years slaps the board from the table, or someone turns to their spouse and says that they can’t keep living under the same roof. Those are stories that have nothing to do with game design, but they certainly influence play and how the game unfolds that particular time. Remember, though, that we can—and sometimes need to—keep the second and third levels separate. When we’re up to this level, our experience of the second level can be deeply changed. Memoir 44 might be entirely ruined for you by the guy making shooting noises every time he fires at your position. And then he complains when one of his units gets taken out… Not a good story.

At least, not a good story to be a part of at the moment, but a great story to tell later. Keep in mind, though, that how you experience the second level of narrative, the board level, can be profoundly influenced by the above the board level. It’s easy to walk away from a game feeling cranky about the game when what you’re really cranky about is the player to your right who would spend twenty minutes on a move and then make a play just when you were going to get up to get another drink. So then you’d rush your move just to make up for the foot-dragging, and you ended up losing badly. Of course, the game might legitimately be a bad game, but the story you got caught up in was much worse.   

When we think about games and their stories, we’re thinking about a nicely complicated interweaving of narrative and activity. We need to think about narrative because we won’t win every game we play, but the story of the game—at one or more of the three levels—draws us back to the table. It’s why I think that single-minded pursuit of victory doesn’t entirely explain why people like to play games. I don’t know about you, but I’ve heard—and been a part of—some great stories, and the promise of more stories makes me want to open up a few games and unfold a few extra chairs for friends.   

Games: Wishlists, Grails, and the Reasons Why

I've posted a few things over on The Gaming Gang site. I've tidied up this newest post, but I'll send up a draft here...

The easy way to start this piece would be to brag about the games I received as gifts this year. My wife even suggested that I put up a Geeklist devoted to reasons that I would do the happy ‘I didn’t get socks this year’ dance. A list like that might develop as I write, but that’s not the issue motivating me right now. 

Let me start with a story from a few weeks ago, when the “so, what’s on your wishlist” talk really ramped up. Amazon isn’t really useful for this purpose for most of us interested in gaming as a hobby, so I rely on the Geek. I pulled up my wishlist for Dana, and was immediately embarrassed. I had to explain that the more than sixty games on the list were not a measure of greed. I keep a goodly few grail games on that list, and some are games I just want to remember. So I talked my way through the top of the list, pointing out ones that hadn’t been published, ones that were the in the grail category (good luck scaring up a copy of Jati, for example), and then we scrolled down to Hammer of the Scots. “Ah, now this is a kind of wargame, and I’m not all that interested in wargames. But it’s highly respected, and it’s an example of a kind of game I don’t have and that I do find interesting: block games.” I talked through the system that Columbia Games developed and why the system is interesting and unique as a game mechanism, and why the system is particularly useful for wargames. I have played a few wargames, though it’s been a long time, and I just don’t have the time to immerse myself in ASL, so a system like the blocks or cards intrigues me. Dana nodded and we went on. 

A few weeks later, she began to insist that I never go out to pick up the mail. “I’m expecting some packages, and I don’t want you to see where they’re from.” I’m going to assume that you, like me, understand that to be code for “from an online game store.” I mean, if it’s a box from Amazon, the stuff inside could be anything from designer facial tissue to whoopie cushions to weaponized Nerf products. 

As the colorfully wrapped packages appeared in the closet—we have two cats who seem convinced that wrapping paper makes good nesting material—I took them out to measure and shake. When Christmas morning came around, I was overwhelmed with the generosity of my wife and her family. Games. Good games.

And, yes, Hammer of the Scots was one of them. 

The important issue here, though, is not the games (though they are sweet). The important issue is that the games brought us together for a fun conversation. At a time of year when family demands can seem onerous, games can help us slow down as we come together over a cleared table. Not everyone will want to play, and we might not get a chance to play the really good games we know are out there, but the time we spend with family and friends during the holidays should remind us of what’s really at stake in gaming: love, playfulness, and joy. Useful to remember, too, when you get snowed in for a week in February, or any time throughout the year. 

Happy Holidays! (And now, please excuse me. I have some stickering to do…)

 

A Table, Darkly

I've been putting some reviews and news up on the Gaming Gang site, but this is the first article I've done in a while. The text is here, but the pretty pictures and stuff are on the Gang site, so go check it out there. 

I spent many years working out at various martial arts school. When I lived in Atlanta it was pretty easy to visit schools, hang out with other practitioners, as well as go to class at your home studio. The things I learned about body mechanics have come in very handy when it comes to keeping a squirming toddler in place long enough to change a diaper. It might sound like I drifted from style to style, but I was pretty much in class four nights a week at the same school. I went through forms, weapons, and sparring with the same people for a long time. But we didn’t get together outside the classroom very often. When we finally did, though, our conversations—though not on martial arts—were long and comfortable, as if we’d been having these talks for years. 

So I keep wondering what we’re learning about each other when we sit down with a board game between us?

Sure, boardgames aren’t as physical as the martial arts, and I think that the way my martial friends and I engaged each other on that very basic, physical level had something to do with how our comfort in conversation grew without actually talking to each other. But games reveal the intellectual contact points between players. I’m not suggesting that you must be an academic research scientist to really get together over games. I mean intellectual in the broader sense of all the kinds of thinking you bring along wherever you go. 

It’s easy to think of the intellectual as being more abstract than the body, and in many ways it is. But at the same we engage the world pretty much entirely with our brain, so a game—a kind of play that very explicitly stimulates the mind—should reveal a lot about the people around you. 

Maybe even things they don’t want you to know. 

We can think about issues like analysis paralysis, king making, ‘tells,’ or even ideas about good losers and bad winners are all things we can learn about the other people at the table. But the people we play with learn a lot about us, too. How do you react under pressure, or when a goal is out of reach? Can you continue to have fun even when you’re losing…maybe even losing badly? We learn some very subtle things about each other at the game table. Don’t believe me? Businesses like to run simulations games to learn these very tendencies. And to build teamwork skills, of course.  

In my martial arts days, my teacher suggested that I and my classmates go work out with other schools. There comes a point when you know your sparring partner too well and you can get complaisant. So we’d find a lot of other people to work out with, to keep us sharp. But with board games, there’s no reason to push that edge. At least, not with the same issues at stake. We might find more people to game with in order to work on our poker face, to see how we might be interpreting rules, or simply to meet new people over a neutral, fun activity. But playing the same people year after year seems to me a way to learn to be comfortable with others, to deepen friendships and community.

If you and I were to sit down with a game right now, what would we learn? Who know? But it could be the start of a beautiful friendship. 

NB: I have been working on the Thirty Days of Games project essays. Still not in great shape, but they're coming along.

 

Play and Games

You can find the final version up on The Gaming Gang (and lots of other good stuff), but I'll post a rough draft to get you interested: 

I have a friend I haven’t seen in a while who hates boardgames. He wants to turn and walk purposefully away, he says, when anyone at a party or after dinner suggests opening one up. 

“I want to make things up on my own,” he says. 

The statement’s a little unfair, I think, because we all like to make stuff up on our own. We hum our own songs (especially if we can’t remember the tune of that song we’re trying to hum), tell ourselves the story of our lives in our heads, add stickers to computers, pin up photos and cartoons in our cubicles (if we’re allowed to, and we grouse and stick pins in the boss doll when we can’t). I know I’ve drifted from “making stuff up” to “changing the environment,” but the impulse feels similar—particularly if you’re in an industrialized country that’s cut spending for arts education. You do what you can with what you have.

But here’s the question I want to ask when my friend isn’t around: Where’s the play in playing games?

Roger Caillois offers continuum with two poles (he offers a lot of other ideas, too, but we’ll stick with the continuum for now): paidia and ludus. Paidia is free-play. It’s finding yourself in an empty room with a bouncy ball and a couple of paddles. If you’re me and my wife, you’d start whacking the ball around just to see where you could get it to go. Ludus adds rules. A bouncy ball, two paddles, and a line in the middle of the room; now, you have to smack the ball over the line, let it bounce twice, and not let it hit the back wall, or it’s a point. First person to…oh, ten, wins. But even that example has a lot of freedom in it. 

The games that hobbyists embrace tend toward the far side of the ludic end of the spectrum. Power Grid? 18xx? I’m still trying to respond to my friend (and a lot of other people like him) by trying to identify the sort of play he’s looking for. Maybe it’s a foolish task, but I’m willing to be a little foolish.

I’d like some help with this, but my first thought is that the play space itself is complicated. When playing the Ragnar Brothers Snow Tails or Friedemann Friese’s Fearsome Floors, I’m not alone at the table when I make husky noises during the former or mimic movie monster groans while playing the latter. The impulse to paidia is as strong as the move to the ludic. House rules, too, push the ludic structure open a bit. And then there’s the idea of gaming the game, of exploiting what are usually design flaws for an almost mechanical win.

Yes, a rules lawyer will insist on playing the game as written—especially if the lawyer is finding a way to improve their own position—but most of us, in my experience, recognize the play in the game. Of course, we are a bit peculiar, spending so much time parsing rules for how fast zombies move and talking like pirates. And it’s just fine that my friend runs away from anything not improvisational. Nevertheless, he’s missing, I think, that his activities have their own rules, and not acknowledging that fact makes the play a bit less interesting. 

 

Crokinole, the Review

Over on The Gaming Gang. The basic version is here (but it's prettier with pictures):

Game Name: Crokinole
Designer: Public Domain
Publisher: Various, Mayday Games
Year: 1860s
Players: 2 (four in a partnership game)
Ages: 6+
Playing time: 30 mintues
Retail: $100+

Contents:
14 natural disks
14 black disks
storage box with score track on lid
2 scoring pegs
eight wooden posts
eight metal screws and a length of surgical tubing (if you want highly reactive bumpers)
crokinole board

I remember moments in elementary school and junior high when the teachers would come to the end of their lesson—or patience—and we would be free to follow our own interests. As long as we stayed in our seats. You could easily push the edge of this caveat by spinning around to see if your buddy behind you already had a sheet of paper out (not pulled raggedly from a spiral notebook, you hoped) and was folding it carefully into a triangular football. I can’t easily explain why the flicking that ensued was so enthralling, but the rest of the class simply vanished. Until one or the other of us flicked the extra point too hard and hit someone in the head. The teacher’s sudden yell would make you think you’d put out one of Laura Miller’s blue eyes. The football would vanish into the teacher’s desk, and we’d all have to turn our chairs around and keep both feet on the floor.

When you consider the appeal of flicking things (there’s also the grade school tradition of flicking ears, but that’s designed for cruelty, and I really don’t think Laura Miller was hurt by that paper triangle), it’s no wonder that quite a number of flicking games evolved out of folk traditions. A particular flicking game that has a lot of new buzz going for it—amazing, considering that the origins go back to the mid-nineteenth century—is crokinole. The buzz is around the new Mayday Games boards, but I’ll give a brief overview before I return to the new boards (one of which I own—w00t!—not to give away the tone of my review).

Crokinole is a simple game, as you’d expect because of its folk origins. The playing surface is a circle a little over two feet across. Three concentric circles mark the scoring areas—if you have disks left in those rings after a round. At the center of the board is a recessed circle just slightly larger than the disks. That’s the sweet spot. Sink a piece in the hole and you get twenty points. You get fifteen for keeping a piece in the center circle, though that task is made trickier by the eight posts along the line marking that circle. And if your disk straddles a line? Take the lower points. The middle ring is ten points. Outer ring is worth five. And then there’s a little neutral area between the line marking the outer ring and the ditch (for keeping flicked disks from zinging into the Cheetos, and storing zero-scoring disks). That little area? Worth nothing. So make sure your disks don’t drift to the edge.

On your turn, you flick. That outer ring is broken into quadrants, and you have to rest your disk on the line of the outer ring and within your quadrant. You can cheat a little bit over the line, but not too much. If the playing area’s clear, you go for the twenty…and you have to have your disk stay in the fifteen circle. Or it comes back out and goes into the ditch. If your opponent has a piece on the board, you have to make contact with it, though you can use combination shots to accomplish this goal. If you don’t make contact with one of your opponent’s pieces, then the piece you shot—and all of your own pieces that you touched—come off into the ditch. That can be a lot of pain. When all the disks have been played, tally the points. Subtract low from high, and give the difference to winner of the round; the opponent scores zero. First person to an agreed-upon total—usually 100—wins.

I’ve got to mention the one-cheek rule: you can’t move your chair during play, and you always have to have one cheek on the seat. Did I mention the folk origins?

The game is simple, delightful fun. Play is quick, and you can easily fall into either a deep silence or a constant stream of chatter back and forth. The boards are eye-catching, and if you have the space to have one set up in a corner for a game day, it’s a great way to keep late-comers occupied until the current longer game(s) come to an end. Of course, if you don’t like dexterity games, stay away.

Back to the buzz. A decent crokinole board has, until recently, required either a woodshop and well-developed skills or a serious outlay of cash to get someone with a woodshop and skills to make one for you. Of course, the boards that people like the Hilinskis andWillard assemble are heirloom quality. Mayday Games, though, has been working on a plan to bring decent, relatively inexpensive crokinole boards to North America. And they have succeeded. I was in the first wave of people to receive one of these boards, and I have been pleased with the product. Are there weird little things with the board? Yes. A couple of little pimples. The lines that mark the rings are painted on top of the finish of the playing surface. The pegs are a little…uneven. And the lacquer of the ditch has some seriously ugly sections. Mostly, these issues are cosmetic, and others can be dealt with by applying a bit of judicious force or a couple coatings of wax. Other purchasers have not been so lucky; there have been issues with shipping as well as the product. Mayday Games, though, have been absolutely stellar in their customer service, and I suspect that their quality control will improve as they take these complaints back to the manufacturer.

Here’s the kicker: the Mayday Games boards cost half or a quarter what the heirloom boards do. A fabulous price for a very fine product. And a lot more fun to flick around with than a paper football.

Game Day Reflections

OK, the pretty stuff is over at The Gaming Gang. But you can read the basic stuff here.

I ended a recent post by noting that games can be used as markers of life. We can remember (hazily) the times in college when we played hack-n-slash D&D as a drinking game (and what ever happened to the people we were dating at the time?). But at other moments, our lives and world are sufficiently memorable. I hosted a game day on a recent Saturday, the 11th of September. We didn’t spend a lot of time talking about what that date meant, but we also couldn’t avoid it.

There’s not really a good transition after that topic, and yet we have to keep going. So I think the point here is that we bring the rest of our lives with us to the game table, and that the rest of the people around the game table—old friends or relative strangers—will bring a lot of their lives with them, too. Perhaps their grandmother just got arrested for shoplifting, or they had three tons of gravel delivered to their house due to a typo on an order form. Whatever’s going on, you, the host, need to keep things running smoothly, and I admit that I’ve not always been good about maintaining that smoothness. Still, a bit of roughness here and there shouldn’t grind your game day to a halt.

The recent Owl House Game Day is a pretty good example of how an event can go. One player showed up at the early start time, and I was glad that I had set out my Crokinole board. We spent some time flicking disks and chatting about life. I don’t want to brag about my astonishingly fast reflexes, but I assure you that if it weren’t for espresso-turboed muscle twitching I’d be wearing an eyepatch right now. I’m drinking rum in honor of that non-existent patch. Other players showed up over the next few hours, and we ended up with six altogether. Not a bad number. But part of my role during the event was to make introductions and to keep the conversational ball in the air (a volleyball, not football, metaphor) during slow points and between games. It’s wonderfully useful to have games to talk about, and that certainly helps to keep the conversation moving.

Like many other game days, once everyone was in place we played a lot of different titles over the course of the evening. Chrononauts (an easy game to stop and re-start), Werewolf (on the iPad…an interesting experience), Forbidden Island (we died twice), and a late game of Bohnanza (without a single fart joke).

And I had an insight just before the rest of the guests wended their ways past the plants on the front porch and into the house: don’t explain all the games, give space to the people around you. Make sure that they get to play one of the games they brought, or at least get to explain a game that you own but they might have played more. I’m learning this lesson because I have a toddler in my life, and one of the ways to make her happy is to give her autonomy (or the illusion of autonomy—we’re very Orwellian, my wife and I, in cultivating this particular illusion). I’ve noticed that I, too, am happier when I get to make meaningful choices and when I contribute—again, meaningfully—in my community (and I’m thinking family, workplace, neighborhood, and so on). When gamers come over to play games at your house, remember that the issue at stake is not you and your house. The issue is fun. And games.

But do make sure have enough to eat and drink.

Flick, Yes!

That's my new post up at The Gaming Gang. I'll drop the text here for you, but you should click over to the Gang to see the pictures.

I can remember two very lucky moments in gaming. The first was when I rolled two natural twenties in a row in a game of Gamma World that let me bluff my way into a quonset hut. That I managed to pull off the improbable feat sent my GM into a deep funk. I think I was denied any useful treasure for several sessions.

The second bit of luck came in 1991. I found a guy, Billy Stevens, selling carrom boards in Durham, NC. I can’t remember now how I initially made contact with him, but I attended a carrom get-together that he hosted every week at a pub not far from the Durham Bulls’ baseball field. I became deeply enamored of the game, but I was also working in a small video rental shop, and my hours fluctuated wildly, so I was only able to attend the game days sporadically.

But we’re not to the lucky part yet.

That spring a lot of buzz started to develop around a project put together by Jane’s Addiction’s frontman, Perry Farrell. A concert/festival was going to go on tour, an event he was calling Lollapalooza. The project was making a stop at the new Walnut Creek on the outskirts of Raleigh, and my friends immediately bought tickets when they went on sale. I abstained. The job, you know? And then the day before the show, Billy Stevens walks into the store and asks if I’d like to go to Lollapalooza. He had rented space for displaying and selling carrom boards, and he needed people to staff the booth. My manager overheard the conversation and insisted that I go. So, early the next morning, I drove to Billy’s house, packed up carrom boards, and headed with a few of his friends to Lollapalooza. I spent the day drinking beer we’d smuggled in (to avoid the concession prices), playing carrom, and wandering over to the stage to watch the acts.

I mention these stories not to focus so much on luck—that bane of gamers—but to set up my love of flicking games and other table-top dexterity games (we’ll skip over my deep and abiding interest in pool). Because of this interest, my wife pre-ordered a Mayday Games Crokinole board for me in order to celebrate my recent graduation. I’ve been flicking the little disks around daily since it was delivered. (As an aside, Mayday seems to have some quality control issues with this first round of boards, but mine arrived unscathed and in good shape.) And I want to point out that games are not your life. It makes me a little uneasy to say that, but it’s true. But it’s true in the way that photographs are not your life, much as Kodak would love to advertise to you the exact opposite claim. Like photos, though, you can construct snapshots of your life through games, while remembering that it’s important to focus on the life and the stories.

And if you’re in town, stop by and flick some disks.