I decided to give myself a long weekend after a very long haul of craziness at work. I’m mostly in charge of my own self at work, so I have no malevolent boss to blame. Except me. It’s true, I am my own Gargamel.
After another visit by our DSL provider to reconnect our tubes to the internet (a new wall jack, new wiring to the house, new wire from jack to modem), we were ready for some gaming.
Dana and I were looking for something quick, something fairly light, but that had a nice collection of bits. I was feeling in a mood to have pieces to manipulate. I brought out a stack of games: Airships, Can’t Stop!, Ingenious, and Kachina. Dana picked a return to a game I got stomped at the last time we played: Airships. She insists on playing the French, so I picked the Germans. No one gets any advantages, but you do get themed bits to move about. The theme of Airships (ne Giganten der Lufte) is the building of, well, you know, don’t you? Dirigibles. Zeppelins. Eventually, you want to get in on the building of the Hindenburg, and it’s the completion of that airship that ends the game. But what you’re doing is building little dice engines. You win cards, and victory points, eventually, by assembling a factory. The different parts of the factory allow you to use—or transform—dice.
Roll for upgrades, for zeppelins, for construction on the most explosive of blimps. There’s a mechanism that gives you extra, virtual pips if you lose a roll. And poor Dana lost a lot of them. Some key rolls. At very inopportune times(Dana at one point even kissed her dice and asked them for a new pair of shoes). I didn’t feel superior for having the dice break well for me, though Dana was losing interest. So I pushed the game ending even though I wanted to explore a bit more engine-building. This is another game of tactics, though with mediating mechanics. Still, mediating was not enough to balance a two-player game.
I’ve written about cards driving the randomness in a game, and here we have dice. But notice that I didn’t feel like I was playing essentially a better game than Dana. She played well. At one point, she had a much better balanced factory than I did. Hell, I think she ended the game with a better board. My win seems almost inexplicable. For most of the game, though, we were both having a good time, even when I kept rolling freakishly well. Staying happy and engaged—winning or losing—requires a cooperation between the players. A recent podcast round table discussed the social contract of gaming, and that contract is key to the enjoyment Dana and I have when playing across the table, sky blue under our elbows.
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