The river of snot is starting to dry up. More like a summertime creek of snot with random freshets brought on by dust. So Wendy went to bed early—happily!—and the only thing we can hear over the monitor is her fan.
We’ve reached a sort of meta-analysis-paralysis. AP—as the geeks refer to the general condition of analysis-paralysis—is the state some players get to when they look at a board, a hand of cards, a tile, and then freeze as they play out, in the manner of Deep Blue, all of their choices and the attendant consequences. We all suffer from this from time to time. Just the other night, Marianne got hung up in AP as she pondered a version of the Monty Hall problem: Do I flip a tile and give Dave the choice of trucks? Do I take the truck with two and leave him some of the animals he needs? Or the new tile might give him more…? Dave and I played along, so the moment went well, and this freeze-up happened at the very end of the game, so it felt appropriate.
Tonight… Ah. I keep wanting to give Dana her choice of game. This hobby is not her default activity, and I want to give her the opportunity to pick a game that seems interesting to her. But I know the games we have better. There’s a tendency to pick a small box, looking for time and energy constraints, though I know that some of the largest boxes we own (hello, Stratego! nice box, Color Dwarf [the name of which sounds better in German: Farbenzwerge]) are our least interesting games. The situation, to recall a film line, comes from a failure to communicate.
So we ended up with the tiny abstract game Ponte del Diavolo (box photo from Sentieiro). You play either pale or dark pieces onto the interstices of a grid—like a chess or checkers board, but I can’t resist the word “interstices.”
Such a sexy word. Like a woman at a party wearing a little black dress, holding a sweating glass of white wine, and looking at you with a raised eyebrow. Like that. Turns out that you have some sort of stain on your shirt that looks like her home state (you’re hoping Rhode Island but fear Alaska). In Ponte del Diavolo—remember?—you want to develop “islands” of exactly four pieces no less than one space away from from other groups of four that you can then link with the titular bridges. The longer the connected string of islands, the more points you score. About halfway through, Dana announced that she was losing spectacularly. She was only wrong on the adverb.
The experience of the Devil’s Bridge left us out of sorts, so Dana called out a name that I’d been hoping to revisit, Druidenwalzer (a game I picked up because of an episode of The Spiel). This little Kosmos two-player game has an odd grip on my imagination, perhaps because of the art or the fairy dance and druid’s battle that comprise the main action of the game. The difficult part is to see how the dance, which can shift several cards, will affect the combat, which can involve several more cards. As I went through the rules and started to feel comfortable, even going so far as to play the first dance, Dana sort of shut down.
“I can’t do this.”
“What?”
“When they have those questions on standardized tests that ask you to flip the image in your head and pick that image out of the group below? Yeah, I always missed all of them.”
So, we packed up Druidenwalzer.
After the game was put away, we talked about the cultural weight and baggage of games, particularly as those issues play out in families and gender. Because Dana has no trouble knitting any damn thing you want. She can take a pattern that has nothing to do with her final vision and adopt it—shifting stitch counts, adding or removing appendages, changing orientation. She’s a genius at crafts as well as fabric arts. And this is before we get to her scholarly work: she’s a subtle and accomplished thinker. So, something happens when we sit down to play games, something that works on an emotional level that short-circuits her otherwise marvelous brain. Perhaps it’s a question of what’s at stake; certainly, that would play into issues around high-stakes testing. We talked about a lot of stuff, and I’ll leave off with these hints and suggestions. The issues of family and gender are rich for all of us, and well worth delving into.
The issue for the project, though, is how to get around the AP. So we’re going to try a new practice: we choose a game the night before and let me try to work on the rules before we sit down to it. I pulled out a small group for us to look at, and I think we’ll be in a better position for when it’s our turn to pick whether or not to send the pandas to Dave.
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