Wendy’s first music class, Kindermusik. She came home with an elephant-shaped maraca.
Boxes from Dana’s grandparent’s house arrived. A variety of oddments. Dress patterns, old coins, macrame plant holders, hats and scarves, mugs, pitchers, cross-stitch. All the boxes smell like the musty stuff of old people. Stale perfume and old cigarettes. Everything’s out for an airing and washing.
And we played three rounds of Castle Keep, a children’s game. We hadn’t played in a long time, we’d picked it up years ago at a local Goodwill. The manufacturer, Gamewright, does good work, so we like to pick up any complete games of theirs that we find at thrift shops. Because of a series of strong storms moving through the area, Dana’s head was throbbing. This painful reminder of the power of nature pushed us into a choosing a familiar, light game. At it’s heart, Castle Keep is a pattern matching game, but even lighter than Abracadabra. You match pattern (curly, straight, zig-zag) or color (blue, red, gold). Four towers, four walls, one keep per person—that’s what you’re trying to be the first to lay out. And I’m just going to breeze over the details, such as they are. The rules offer a variety of variants, including a solitaire game, and we played one of them: Empire. Nice, heavy tiles. Bright colors and patterns. Cute details on the tiles (sheep, horses, and so on). Great kids game, though there’s a possibility for screwing with your opponents that you’ll want to talk about before you sit down to play. Unless your family is OK with that sort of behavior.
The game is fun, but not deep, and it can devolve mechanically pretty quickly. The question is: what interesting choices do I have? In Jambo, you had quite a few. Play into your market, add a utility, sell products, use an animal or other person. That idea of the interesting choice is what keeps me coming back to games. A game can collapse time. Many days of selling, many seasons of farming, months at the French court, all take place in a matter of an hour or two. Of course, this collapse also strips levels of detail out, it abstracts the experience. The level of abstraction can be reduced down to the level of, say, chess, go, or checkers (or myriad other games) where the algorithms of the design meet the ruleset and you engage your partner in that intellectual space. That experience can also be fulfilling, but Dana and I like a little more window dressing. We like the fiction of character, the narrative built within theme. Even a theme-less game (or very close to themeless, see chess, above) develops a narrative, but that narrative is unadorned, like the game. I don’t think that the lack of adornment is a judgment; there’s a lot of excitement and delight in those narratives.
So Dana’s knights built better keeps and kept mine at bay. Alas. So I will retreat, rally those remaining loyalists, and have another round tomorrow. Maybe as a metro designer, maybe as a medieval monk, maybe as Nixon or Kennedy. We’ll see.
And as I type, a storm rages. Thunder, lightning. A temperature drop of twenty degrees. Another plains rain.
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