Blue Moon City: Choice, Art, and a Couple of Dragons

Sometimes you just have to embrace a fantasy. And so we did. After a day of chasing a toddler, catching boogers, and generally maintaining house, home, body, and soul, we sat down to a game of Blue Moon City. (The picture to the right is from Oopsiak.) 

I’m not sure how many Reiner Knizia designs we’ve played already (Ingenious is the obvious earlier entry), but we encounter him again here. Blue Moon City felt more open than Notre Dame, which is a bit like saying that the Nebraska capitol building is a bit taller than Luke Lavender’s 1860 cabin three blocks away.

In this Knizia game, you lay out a slightly cross-shaped grid of tiles—the layout can be different each game. You have a deck of cards with values from one to three. The one- and two-value cards offer special powers (movement of your piece or one of the dragons, changing the color of the cards you play, all kinds of things). The three card is just a heavy resource. On a turn, you move, play cards to contribute to a building (with scoring possibilities), draw back up, and hand the turn to the player on your left. You need to consider how the cards work, what each building offers, and push toward the final score count by contributing to the obelisk (missing in the photo for kilroy_locke). The game moves quickly, and, while there’s   too much space in the box, I’d recommend playing a copy.

And now I have to ask what it means to “play a copy.” As it applies to film or recorded music, the meaning of “play a copy” is clear, and we can talk about scenes and acts, DVD extras, the various movements of a sonata or other composition. But with a game, the conditions and experience vary even more widely than audience experience in reader-response theory. You have the same framework—you engage with this thing before you—but a game demands a kind of embedded agency that the other genres lack. You can’t choose Hamlet’s destiny or whether Han shot first or not. You consult the text. With games, the choice becomes yours.

And Dana’s been enduring all of these games and game discussion with stellar and sterling good humor. She’s had a lot of rough shocks, and games themselves bring up a lot of bad memories. I keep saying that games are a key component of human experience and expression, so if Dana’s experience of games has been poisoned, than a key constituent of her humanity has been skewed. The attention that we play to the gamespace on this project (and this blog)—attention we must pay—bears this out.

In the discussion of whether or not games are art, I keep thinking of Yehuda Berlinger’s extension of an idea that words give us a handle on the world. With the right signifier, we can get others to almost literally see what we mean. Games lack a word to signify the importance of game play to humanity, and we certainly lack the word(s) to describe a game that vaults to the level of what would be called art in other practices. Is Blue Moon City that kind of game? Maybe. I’m not sure. But I’d sure as hell sit down to it with any one I know.

I’m watching a butterfly explore the honeysuckle that’s just about ready to bloom outside our window, and the constantly inconstant fluttering reminds me of those last three paragraphs. But these are rough drafts. Very rough. So bear with me?

Comments

[VeonV]

WoW :0 I really like these games! Nice Blog :)