We are in the season we will call: Set Oven to Self-Clean. The good thing is that the moisture in the air drops down to hover about and inch and a half off the ground. So, yes, there will be dew. But when you walk out into the sun… Scientists and their fans talk about the sun as an enormous fusion reactor, and They Might Be Giants reminds us that “hydrogen is turned into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees” (which has to do with how e=mc2 actually works in the world). Walking out onto the plains, out from under shade, away from any real humidity, you can feel the sunlight as radiation. It just feels like something terrible. The largest organ in your body is sending danger signals that amount to a million Gollums saying, “It burnssss usssss. Take it away!” If you’re lucky, your brain is a Baggins and pity will move you back under shade, at least, or into air-conditioning if you’re at all lucky—or near a public building.
I think I lost control of the metaphor in that last paragraph, but I hope you’ll stay with me. Here’s the bullet point version for you:
sun equals radiation
radiation equals pain
Tolkien is not universally useful as a source of metaphor
Which
brings us to tonight’s game: Scary Tales (we used two sets: here and here). It’s a bit like playing
“Fractured Fairytales: The Card Game” if the geniuses at Jay Ward
Productions had put Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood in dominatrix
costumes, returned Pinocchio to wood and stranded him on
Pleasure Island
to become a dissipated reprobate, and let the Giant go ahead and eat
Jack and the rest of the family.
We have two topics that come out of this: the beer-and-pretzels game category, and how culture gets taken up in and reflected back by games.
But first, some description.
Strange
as it may seem, this is a Reiner Knizia game (the guy who did
Ingenious, among many many others, and who is usually singled out as a dude with a math doctorate who develops a good product). Strange because this is a game driven
by cards and dice—two mechanisms pretty much synonymous with random. And
it’s mindlessly confrontational. So what you have is a character with a
set of three dice (all dice are identical except for color). Your
character has a one-time-use-only power, but otherwise they’re only
sitting out there to look pretty. Or disgusting. Depends on the
character. You have power cards that let you do a little bit of tactical
play that come into and out of your hand quickly. Some sidekicks show
up and get used up. You can sometimes get a fairy to help you. And the
occasional event card shifts things around.
But, mostly what you pull
off the deck are relics. The relics have point and defense values. Your
task—your only task—is to beat that defense value by rolling dice and
playing cards. If you don’t succeed, you can take the cards that helped
back into your hand. If you do succeed, you can attack again. If you
start your turn with seven or more points in relics, you win. We split a
best two-out-of-two, and the second contest was a bit more
interesting. (For a longer discussion, with a lot of detail, head over to The Spiel. You want to start in around 59:28.)
Beer and pretzels, baby.
That
phrase there describes games that you don’t have to think to play. Not
really think. Keep attacking! Roll the dice! Attack again! The only
problem might be that you’d roll the dice into the pretzels, or off the
floor, or knock over the beer. Essentially, these are slightly more
developed pub games. Games like Shut-the-Box, Anchor and Crown, Liar’s
Dice, and so on. More genteel versions include Bingo, LCR, or the
dreidel game. Keep spinning, rolling, filling in squares… Winner forces
someone to drink, or gets gelt, or takes a stuffed animal home. These
are the kinds of casual games humans made up to pass the time before
Bejeweled. I invite you to take a step back and marvel at the passion
for play with a small ruleset that these games suggest. Do we need the
rules because we’re pattern-building creatures and we’re forcing order
out of chaos? Or are the rules a way to form and define an otherwise
too-free-to-be-endured time? Or do they exist to make sure that the
doofus next to you gives the goddam dice to someone else? The rules are a
frame, to be sure, but
ontological or social?
And you know you’ve had too much beer if you’re asking that of the pretzels.
Scary Tales pushes a bit at the edge of that kind of game. Like Can’t Stop!, Scary Tales wants you to make decisions, even if the decisions aren’t challenging—or even much in your control. The Knizia touch shows up in the “if your attack is unsuccessful, you keep your cards” so that you have more resources with which to attack when the next round starts. And it’s hard to simply run away with the game.
Is it good? How do you judge something like this? If your expectations are that the award-winning game designer will take your brain out and give it a good thrashing like he does with Tigris and Euphrates, then you’ll be sorely mistaken. But if you’re looking to play something like Red Dragon Inn with two players, then you’ll have a good time. Oh, and if you like your salacious fantasies tied into fairy tales, you’ll find a lot to like. Especially the Wisdom Fairy.
Let me take a moment…
Right, so the game trades with some heavy cultural coin. Little Red Riding Hood. Snow White. Jack and the Beanstalk. Pinocchio. And that’s just the first two sets. Fairies, elves, ogres, leprechauns…all of those and more make appearances. But games have been trading on our cultural constructs since, oh, Senet (it seems…). Snakes and Ladders teaches lessons (at random) about behavior. I (don’t) encourage you to check out the multitude of Monopoly titles. Games abstract cultural themes and moments and play them out. The aforementioned Monopoly does a bad job of this, but the Battlestar Galactica game works very well. Some of the push to exploit the culture is driven by profit (do I really need to mention the Hannah Montana game?) some is ideological (the single most disturbing game on the Geek is Juden Raus), and some is probably unconscious. My suggestion here is that games tend toward the ephemeral, but the trace they leave is revelatory—and importantly so.
I’ll need to expand that last bit of thinking, but the paragraph can stand as a bit of shorthand, don’t you think?
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