Forest of Games

Gamer: It Means Human

That's not quite the title of my post over on The Gaming Gang. But the content I'll post below is the same.

If you take a moment to research this hobby—and you have enough time to do that, right?—you’ll find a report from the Toy Industry Association saying that games and puzzles pulled in $2.4 billion during 2009. That’s a good chunk of money. I could easily cover all the material needs of my toddler and cats with that kind of cash. But just for fun you can see what the videogame industry made over the same period: $19.7 billion.

That’s a whole lot more cat toys.

And that’s a lot of people buying games.

So when you get up from your office chair to get coffee (or Red Bull, or whatever) and walk past your coworkers, look for sore thumbs and paper cuts because you’re probably passing game players. And that’s assuming that you don’t see Bejeweled (I almost wrote Bejowled, but that’s a different topic) or Farmville open on screens.

I bring all these strange topics up because we call ourselves gamers in a world of humans who are absolutely crazy about playing games. It’s not like we’ve decided—like my uncle—to build steam engines (yes, working steam engines. Little ones). Or fletch our own arrows. Or build scale-model airplanes. Those would be niche hobbies. Our own hobby is an activity pursued by pretty much everybody and by every civilization—and pre-civilization—that ever flourished on the planet. Johan Huizinga way back in 1938 called humans “homo ludens:” man the player (and let’s go ahead and include women in this definition).

Yet only a certain subset of us step up (or sit down, I guess) and admit to the fact that we like games. We’d rather play a game than fletch arrows or change the oil in our cars. Perhaps more than shower, but I’ll leave the stereotypes for later. Why is it so hard to claim this status as homo ludens? Not for this audience—I know how y’all roll—but for the rest of the cube-dwellers playing Mafia Wars on Facebook?

I can think of some easy answers. The marketing geniuses at various toy and game manufacturers sold games to kids, and kids only, during the baby boom’s early years (only 3M tried to market games to the broad swath of the boomers as they reached adulthood, and we can thank that company for inspiring young European game designers, but I digress). I can remember wave after wave of game commercials as a kid (especially leading up to the winter holidays), but I remember comparatively few games for adults outside of traditional games (card games, chess, etc). In short, games are for kids.

As a corollary to “games are for kids,” they don’t make money. They don’t leave an object for sale or admiration. And learning new rules can be difficult. It’s easy for someone who fishes to invite friends over for a fish fry, but a gaming enthusiast can find it difficult to draw friends over to play games—and it’s difficult to play boardgames alone (try a solo game of Vegas Showdown. Or Risk, for that matter.).

I know that I’m collapsing two different categories of gaming, but I think the point still holds: human beings love to play games. Always have, always will. So when someone raises an eyebrow, or looks off into the distance over your shoulder when you say that you love to play boardgames, just understand that they’re lying to themselves if they say they don’t.

And then ask how much they spend on cat toys.

The Mystery of Flux

On Saturday, Laura and Mike—PhD students in math—came over for dinner and a few games. Math people seem to like games, so we talked about a lot of the games we have up on our shelves during dinner, some takeout we’d ordered from a local African restaurant (Ethiopian cuisine being very popular in our house). But we finally sat down to play two: Mystery Express and Fluxx.

Mike’s a quiet guy and he was careful during his turns. Laura’s the energy of the relationship, and her turns were a bit more animated. Mike suffers greatly from AP, as Laura suggested and Mike agreed to, but his turns were never excrutiatingly long. When we started, the rounds went slowly as we familiarized ourselves with the board and our choices, and rounds went faster as the night went on. Then, during the reset moments, we chatted a bit.  

The time element of Mystery Express—both as a limit on actions during a turn and as part of the mystery to be solved—is interesting (the former not so new, but the latter is tricky). You get three chances to look at a deck of clock faces to pick out the face that’s missing. Crazy. The rest of the game is solid fun, particularly if you like deduction games. The rules ensure that everyone—or mostly everyone—has something to do during another player’s turn, and the delightful wrinkle of having a double of every card makes even a second appearance in a turn inconclusive (did you see the mate of the winning clue twice, or did you see both of the non-guilty cards?).

I’d say that our second game, Fluxx (photo by mgoddard), is a love-it-or-hate-it game—at least as far as the gaming community is concerned. It polarizes because it’s based on chaos. The rules and even the winning conditions can change at any moment. The game is at best tactical and can degenerate into merely mechanical. For example, last night we had two strange rules in play: Draw Four, and Your First   Move Is Random (the player to your left picks a card from your hand that you must play). Because we still had the general, starting rule of “Play One,” no one was actually able to choose what to play. This situation can drive many gamers so far past the limits of their patience that they can only communicate back to their patience using international delivery companies. Dana won on the second pass of these rules around the table.

I wouldn’t recommend Fluxx wholeheartedly, but it’s a game that can introduce people to the idea that there are some very strange games out there, some of them masquerading as simple pasttimes. One curious aspect of some players’ reaction to Fluxx is the loss of strategic decision-making. This reaction is curious because it assumes a kind of control—over life as well as games—that I’m told is illusory. Still, the beautiful thing about a perfect information game (e.g., chess) is the opportunity to review all the pieces arrayed against you. You know how each piece moves, so the only unknown is how your partner’s going to play. That kind of game allows you to embrace the idea, however subtly, that life is modeled after the game, when the truth is exactly the opposite—and life offers even less information and control.

One joy of gaming, then, can be the feeling of control over a situation—or, let’s say, the feeling of enhanced control—during the game. As the information available with a game declines (as in most card games, for example), player strategy needs to become more fluid, more local, more tactical. In traditional card games, the play rises to the level of meta-game; the poker-face becomes a requisite for playing well, let alone winning. And I’m very intrigued by games like Fluxx that offer you very little control even as you (usually) have choices for action. We can talk about all of this before bringing up the topic of strategic games, those that offer long-term planning with either perfect or imperfect information.

And yet I’m not sure how to respond to games like the dreidel game, LCR, Farkel, Cthulhu Dice, etc., where the only activity seems to be mindless rolling of a teetotum, die, or dice. I also worry that I’ve reduced my position to the point of the absurd, or I’m resisting my (inevitable) conclusion. Is the dice roll strong enough to act in my metaphor as agency (that is, they represent the illusion of choice)?  Yeesh. I want to say no. But I may be drifting into the nebulous space of “taste.” I enjoy Fluxx but not Cthulhu Dice, though not much separates them, and they both offer insight into lack of information and choice. Even Scary Tales gives a player something to work with in order win, or at least not lose too quickly. It’s clear that I’ll need to explore this a bit more later.

I Am the Master of My Character! Citadels and San Juan

 Saturday was the official date for my graduation. It is the date on my diploma, but Friday the 13th will always be a special day, and, lucky for me, everyone seems to notice that particular day. But only in August. You may continue to quake in fear during the rest of them.

And Saturday was Owl House Game Day. We had a few cancellations, but Dave and Marianne showed up and played two rounds of card-based games—one game each of Citadels and San Juan.

Wendy has been pretty cranked up by having guests over for the last few days, so when Dave and Marianne arrived—exactly on time, those accountants…I tell you—Wendy was a tiny human pinball between her grandparents and her English department fans. Dana quickly and wisely whisked her off to the Lincoln Children’s Museum (until about two years ago, I thought these were devoted to the history and weirdness of childhood, but no. They are indoor playgrounds filled with equipment and lots of random stuff—clothes, wooden food, ersatz tools, myriad balls—that’s simply not nailed down). The five of us grabbed some noshes (veggies from us, amazing muffins from Marianne) and I worked through an explanation of  Citadels which I’ll summarize for you here. (Photo by Shadow Dragon)

Citadels is all about cards, the king piece, and gold, which in my copy looks very much like half-sized Brachs butterscotches. In the game, each player is building districts in a city. Each city comprises up to five districts (color coded: red, green, yellow, blue, purple…if you’re colorblind, good luck). Each district card represents a building in that district, and you can only build one of each building (one green tavern, for example, or one blue cloister). The cost of the building is also the final score for that building (mostly). The first player to build eight buildings ends the game. And then you see who built the best-scoring buildings,   and some players might receive an extra bonus or two. The game is driven, though, by the character cards. These eight cards are available each turn, but the choosing process is one of the great delights of the game. Whoever had the king card last (“It’s good to be the king”) (character photo by AngusBull), shuffles the eight cards, deals one (or more, depending on the number of players) face down to the center of the table, and then flips one face up next to the first one—neither one will be played this turn. The king then chooses one card to keep (secretly!) and passes the remaining cards to his left (or her left—sometimes, the king is a woman; there’s a women’s studies dissertation there, but let’s move on). Each player chooses a card. The last player will have two cards to choose from, and then they place the one they didn’t take face down—still secretly—next to the first two cards. The characters allow each player to bend the rules in some way—eliminating another player’s turn or stealing their money, but it’s important to notice that a character targets another character, not a player. So you might target a character that’s simply not in play that turn. The social intricacies of bluffing and (attempted) blocking deepen the otherwise straightforward play. I followed Dave’s strategy of high-end buildings, though it was my mom who ended the game with eight buildings. I managed to beat Dave by one point because of one bonus score.

We had decided before the first game to play two games with similar structures, so we pulled San Juan out for our second game (photo by the delightfully named mothertruckin). For San Juan, we’re in the age of exploration—well past the medieval period—and well into that later age. A Governor token rotates among the players, and character roles are chosen in clockwise order. Two other important differences: each character (except one) allows all players to act (the person who chose that character gets some bonus), and the cards have three distinct roles. The cards can be money (played face down to the draw pile to build a building), they can be played down as buildings (which produce goods, influence the production of goods, or yield victory   points), or they can be goods (produced face down onto your production buildings and then exchanged—still face down—for hand cards). The cards go quickly…and so does the game. Also, it only plays four, but Dana and Wendy had come back, so my mom went to hang out with them and get some knitting done. Once again, the first player to build the required number of buildings ends the game (Dave, in this case), but the winner is the one with the most victory points. San Juan is a little less constricted than Citadels inasmuch as everyone plays all the time, and you’re hoping for patterns of character deployment and not so distraught if you don’t get the character you were hoping for.

After San Juan, our friends took off for another entertainment, Wendy went to bed, and my mom and Dana settled in to discuss fiber arts. So my dad picked Chrononauts out of the stack of card games. At this moment in the narrative, I’ve gone on a bit about two games, so I’m going to cut this one short. But in Chrononauts, you’re influencing a grid of cards with dates and events on them. Some events are Linchpins that affect Ripplepoints throughout the grid. The active deck allows you to influence the Linchpins and Ripplepoints until you have a pattern (using a Patch card) that matches a goal card (you’re a time traveler trying to get back to an alternate history). You   can also collect three artifacts to win, including a videotape of the big bang…on Betamax. It’s fun, silly, and chaotic—a bit like Fluxx with a structure. And, yes, it’s made by the same company.

The last game of the evening was En Garde! a card game with a conflict/score board. Very simple game, but quick fun. For two players, each player plays cards to move their fencer figure up until they can move exactly onto the same square as their opponent (you can also move backward) in order to score a touch. First to five touches wins.

And that was the end of the Thirty Days of Games experiment as well as the night.

Dana went up to sleep, but I stayed up to talk about games with my parents. We talked about the social practice of games, the future of games as objects and virtual objects, our family’s history of games, and how games fit into my abiding interest in sustainability. Board games tend toward sustainability to the degree that they are replayable, and I stumbled into a conversational space where I suddenly realized that games are important for sustaining us as humans. Sustainability is an argument that’s been ghosting around this project, particularly as it applies to nourishing those parts of us that are not consumer-driven. But like any part of the human experience, games can encourage and reveal darker and perhaps unwelcome aspects—aspects that we need to confront and respond to if we’re going to move forward as individuals. I’m thinking about the ways that Dana and I approach games and how we’ve reacted to each other during this project. Games sustain our social practice.

And then this morning, as my dad and I accompanied Wendy on her morning constitutional, he said that he’d been thinking about another category of games: parlor games. So we talked about charades as well as two games that helped us start this project, Wits & Wagers and Dixit. Our little trio circling the block did a nice job of bringing this all metaphorically back home.

I’ll continue to post here as I sort out more of my thinking—and clean up the writing. I hope that if you get to this point, you’ll offer feedback, suggestions, topics and directions that interest you. And if you’re ever in Lincoln, look us up for a game!

Gems and Palaces: Maharaja

One of Wendy’s roles in our life and house is that of the human alarm clock. She offers a gentle and burbling alarm, so you wake with a happy feeling. A sort of charm alarm. So while graduation was set for three, we were all up, breakfasting, and twiddling our thumbs in the early sevens.

Luckily, we have some games.

After I brewed up a third round of coffee, I began an extended show and tell for my mom, dad, and brother. My brother has four kids—two teens, two pre-teens; three are boys, one girl—and, while my parents are interested in games, my brother takes these opportunities to draft lists of entertainments for his family and their friends. For my dad, this time is a chance to walk down memory lane and tell us about the games he enjoyed as a kid and young adult. My mom stays out of these discussions because her family didn’t play a lot of games.

We looked at Acquire, Twixt (both 3M games, the latter a favorite of my dad’s), 1960: The Making of the President, Stonehenge, Piecepack, Threehouse, and on, and on. About eleven, I pulled down Maharaja: Palace Building in India. So I spread out the felt (approved now by my Carolina Tarheel-loving dad), and we set the game up.

The game takes up a lot of space, but it’s really pretty, so you’re happy to have the board take up so much of the table (pictures by Tommy8). This game has the classic tension—classic, at least, in terms of recent game design—of offering many ways to get things done, but not enough time to get them all done. The game works like   this: you play architects who are developing the various cities and villages in an Indian state. You place houses in villages in order to travel over them (or pay the other players with a house or houses there) to the cities where you build palaces (and houses) to score points when the Raja visits. Points get turned into money, but the person with the most palaces at the end will be the winner. The game has a lot of activity that falls into a comfortable pattern after the first couple of rounds of your first play, and it’s only after that pattern becomes clear that you can start to put together a strategy. You might see your strategy change after that first insight, though, and that’s when you start to understand that this game has a lot to like.

A lot to like even if you bollix up a move early on and realize that you’ll have to scramble even more to redeem your play. Like, say, I did. Forget you have to pay to travel, did you? I did. And that hurt. But not as badly as the rats in Notre Dame.

My brother and father, it turns out, are avid gamers. Give them a new ruleset and they focus in on the play, look around at the boards and pieces, ask a question or two about how the pieces all mesh together, and then carefully consider their options and play. They were a great audience and a lot of fun to play with.

Sadly, we had to cut the game a little short. We were running into lunch as well as the time for getting to graduation. So we folded up the board, scooped all the bits into their bags, and settled the felt back   in the closet.

At the moment, I’m wondering about families and gaming. My mom—as I’ve mentioned—didn’t play a lot of games, and neither did Dana (and Dana’s experiences were not good). But my brother and I, as well as our father, had good experiences, and we’re very happy to settle in with pretty much any game you drop down in front of us. I don’t think that this difference is a gender issue, so I’m curious about families and how they prime us for gaming later in life. Further, I’m wondering if game-play style is influenced by family as well. Any thoughts?

One more day for this phase of the blog. We’ll have an Owl House Game Day on Saturday, and then I’ll back off on the rate of posting. If there are themes or subjects that interested you particularly, please let me know.

Settlers of Catan: Oh, Yes, I Have Wood for Sheep

I remember a commonplace I used to say after graduating from college with a humanities degree when people asked what I learned. “I learned how to learn,” I would say. The sentence made perfect sense to me as well as to my cohort of other humanities majors gathered around a bonfire out in some field while musicians plucked and hammered away somewhere nearby.

Much later, during the No Child Left Behind discussions, I would hear certain commentators and politicians calling for measurable accountability. “Students need to learn and be accountable—and so do their teachers. What does ‘learning how to learn’ even mean?” And I would pause in my chopping of cilantro to growl at them about being able to understand what one didn’t know and to develop a way to   address your own ignorance.

And now I have another idea. Though the cilantro has long since returned to earth.

When I played Keltis with my parents the other day, we were slowed down by a barrage of questions and uncertainties. So I went back over rules, strategies, and play choices as the game board was cautiously, tentatively developed. Slow going, but we ended on a good note.

The evening left me a little unsure about my choice for tonight: Settlers of Catan (yes, another SdJ winner) (photo by skell). The game’s a little more intricate than Keltis, more moving parts: roads, settlements, cities, development cards, resource management, dice, and the robber.

Here’s how it works: a sort of meta-hexagon—the island of Catan (photo by msaari)—is composed of a series of smaller hexagons, each of which offers a resources and is assigned a number between two and twelve. Each player rolls two dice, collects resources from hexes with that number (but only if they have a settlement or city on an intersection bordering that hex). Settlements, cities, development cards, largest army, and longest road yield victory points. First to ten wins.  

We clicked along through the description with only a few distractions. The play moved along at a rate that suggested that we all knew what to do. Trading was good, the robber was deployed wisely, and my dad won by three.

Can you learn how to learn? Does experience beget literacy that begets quicker acquisition?

I’ll add two more details: We had a quick run through on the basics of Go, and after we played Settlers my dad and I started a game of San Juan. We both had three buildings up when my brother arrived from Chicago. So I’m inclined to think more about bootstrapping.

So it turns out that we didn’t buy a lot of games when I was a kid. We received them as gifts, mostly. Maybe one or two purchases, which would explain why I don’t remember us every buying them.

Tomorrow, we ramp up to Maharaja.

Keltis: Birth and the Endless Knot

In terms of the Spiel des Jahres, Wendy was born in the Year of Keltis. That year, 2008, Reiner Knizia finally got his red pawn for a game that was widely—and rightly—considered a multi-player version of Lost Cities, itself a simple yet compelling card game for two from Kosmos. Knizia had been a bride’s maid for many years, and many good games, before the SdJ committee finally gave him a nod. Discussion at the time centered on the mercy of the committee (“That Reiner, at least he’s no Susan Lucci”), but the game was given only cursory attention. Yes, everyone said, it’s as solid a game as you’d expect for multi-player   Lost Cities.

Then Keltis never got released in the States (Essen picture from Firepigeon). Instead, Rio Grande game brought out Lost Cities: The Boardgame. Slightly different play, and with different thematic chrome plated on. In Europe, a few other games in the Keltis line have appeared (the one I’m interested in, and which is impossible to find, is Neue Wege, Neue Ziele), but nothing else has come out for Lost Cities.

Wendy was T-6 months when Keltis won, and it was my sworn duty as a gaming dad-to-be to track down and bring home a copy of Keltis. But no one in Lincoln was going to carry it. At the time, I was having a series of deeply intense discussions with a guy I’d met on BoardGameGeek. We were both interested in some of the more intellectual, social—shall I just say philosophical and have done with it?—questions around games. Stewart Woods was also a later-in-life father who’d returned to the academy, and we hit it off splendidly, even though he was in Australia. He had great advice about impending fatherhood and was an invaluable aid to me calming down about the event. And lifestyle changes.

A strange series of coincidences (his acceptance to a gaming studies panel in Europe and travel money from his university) put him in Germany in time for Internationale Spieltage in Essen. I had sent a a simulation game around the world to him, and that act led to his offer: Would I like him to pick up something and send it my way?

And so Keltis traveled to Western Australia and then to Idaho (zip codes are powerfully deceptive) and then here. Dana and I played it on New Year’s Eve. Wendy was less than ten days old.

And we played it again tonight with Wendy’s grandparents, my mom and dad, Lois and Gary.

 Keltis is, as you’d expect from Knizia, simple (picture by JudgeLP). It’s a race game based on hand management. Play a card in one of five suits (after you play a second card—or perhaps a third in some circumstances—you’re committed to playing up or down the suit), and move your pawn forward one on that suit’s path. Draw a card. Randomly placed elements on the board can influence your decisions. As you move forward, the point values climb from negative four to positive ten. The game ends in one of two ways: you empty the draw deck, or you have five pawns altogether (distributed among the 2-4 players) in the final section of the paths. The board is beautiful and looked lovely with its Celtic knotwork on the blue felt.

Have I mentioned that it’s a strong game? Turns go quickly and leave you plenty of time to agonize over your decisions. There are a lot of cards, so you don’t quite feel strangled, but getting them to come into your hand in the right order… One subtle bit lets you choose from suit-specific discard piles, but still, you’re reduced to tactics. And then at some point near the end you realize that you have the cards you need to— But wait, there are four pawns in the final section and… Damn.

About midway through the game, my aunt Joan returned our call to her from earlier in the day. She’s been having heart trouble, and she was finally home after a short hospital stay. My mom handed her cards to me to play her hand while she soothed her older sister through the crisis. I don’t know if Joan called other sisters or friends, but I’ll assume she did.

So as my mom talked, my dad and I finished out the game. Their cell battery died just as the game ended,   so we plugged the phone back in and calculated the final scores. My dad had a sense of what he needed to do, but couldn’t summon the cards he needed. My mom started her movement stacks in the middle of the 0-10 suits and ran out of play options early on. I had a very basic idea of what one might want to do (start either very high or very low) and the  draw piles came to my aid once or twice. (Photo by Goldisan.)

Afterward, we talked about what their gaming histories were. My dad’s family grew up playing trick-taking games and other card games of varying levels of strategic intensity. My mom was taught a few gambling games by her father, a regular frequenter of illegal card games. She knew one or two bluffing games, but otherwise her gaming history is short and a bit sordid. We also talked about how to combine different mechanics into games, and we talked about how the “there are seven plots” meme doesn’t map onto games, in two ways: game “plots” develop among the players, not the game, and the gears of a plot don’t have to mesh—indeed, shouldn’t mesh—in the ways that the gears of a game’s mechanisms need to mesh. Literature depends on a level of ambiguity that game rules must resist. Ambiguity in gaming depends on the other people around the table. My dad said that one of the best thing about a game of Hearts is the talk between hands, a talk that’s missing in PC versions of the game.

As we gather around the table tomorrow, we’ll have to talk about the games they decided our family needed to play when I was a kid. Though I’m a bit afraid that the response I’ll get is this: I don’t know; those were just the games that people gave us.

I'm hoping for more.

Kachina: Relationships Across the Table

As we get closer and closer to huge breakthroughs with language acquisition with Wendy, the summer sinks ever closer to school time. I think this will be a good thing for the girl. She likes other kids, and we like to exploit others to help with her development. Ten days in school this past winter and she transitioned from cruising to walking. Something about watching the baby apes around you do more—and more interesting—stuff underscores your own potential. When you get older, you can refer to this as ‘peer pressure.’ Or you can keep the slightly more neutral term ‘zone of proximal development.’

I keep trying to develop my own ‘zone of changing frustration in a game into an engagement with the game itself’ but this attitude doesn’t seem to clear the filter of my skull. Or it sort of hovers an inch or two outside so that I still appear to be freaking out even as I’m trying to get a grip on what’s going wrong, where I took a misstep, and how I can correct that misstep—if not in this game, then in the next one.

For example, tonight’s game of Kachina went woefully awry for me somewhere in the mid-game and I never recovered (photos by howitzer_120mm). I apparently kept setting up Dana for more points—I counted three times when my tile extended her score from seven to eleven points; though at one point I thought I’d set her up to score but I’d misread her strategy (it was not hummingbirds she was developing; instead, she was thwarting the influence of koshari). Of course, she still scored.

But I suspect that I should backtrack.

First, the game. Second, the nature of social play.

Kachina is a fairly recent Bucephalus Games release. It has a southwest Native American theme…sort of. The art is highly stylized, borrowing its elements from the traditional art of that region. Kokopeli is blissfully absent. But beyond the artwork and tile names, there’s nothing to tie this game to that culture. On each tile in the game is a figure with a particular strength and power. The very strong tiles don’t have extra powers. The very weak ones have extraordinary power in the right contexts. Play is very straightforward: each player has a hand of five tiles. Play one. Score if you have the highest strength in a row or column (or both) after the powers play out. Draw a tile. Play until you’ve used up all the tiles. 

I have lost badly at this game both times I’ve played it. In part, this is due to the rigid way in which I view the board. I keep wanting to go for a big score, but in so doing—by playing tiles a bit awkwardly—I set up the person playing with me.

And so this becomes a larger issue: I have a hard time letting the future unfold as itself. How can you force it to become anything other than what it will become? Dana clearly is better at this. But the ugly thing that unfolded during the game was my intense focus and increasing desperation as I tried to figure out places to score for larger points as I slipped further behind. Dana read my expression as bearing upon her and so threw points my way. In fairly obvious ways. Now, we’re into an intense discussion about the comfort and expectations of the people playing with you.

With a game like Kachina, at some point you can blame the tiles: I didn’t have the right ones at the right time. The information is imperfect—unlike, say, chess, go, checkers, or even tic tac toe—so you can only form partial strategies. I would feel better about myself and the world if I could find comfort in those facts, but I keep struggling to understand where my planning went wrong. At work, I can point to where I cost the journal money, face up to it, and move on. But here… There are no good answers. Perversely, what I really want to do is sit back down and start the game over, but my apparent intensity and off-putting affect sent Dana quickly into the other room to settle in with The Goddess of Fried Okra. We might play the game  again at some point, but I expect it will be a while, which is a pity, because it’s damned intriguing.

So here’s a couple of questions: How do you read the people at the table? I want to make people comfortable around the table, but I’ve failed here; how can I avoid that mistake in the future? Is it ever OK to throw points to someone else (assuming that pretty much everything else is equal and the game doesn’t have that mechanism of shared scoring built into the structure)? How hard is it to let go of goal, even, and just see how the game plays out?

There’s a line somewhere in the social contract about how to behave when you’re losing. I wanted very much to figure out the game, and my intense focus put Dana off. I could have chosen the joking complaint mode to defuse the situation, but by that time I figured she’d take me as really complaining. So, a badly played metagame as well. We’ll start over tonight with my parents. I’m hoping for Keltis. That way we can celebrate Wendy, too.

I Will Attack Grandma's Glasses: Scary Tales

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?

R-Eco: Your Trash Will Bury You

Sunday, nothing but net.

No extraordinary melt-downs. No hairballs. No spoiled food. There’s an impending family visit and a busy week, but for the day itself—just itself.

The impending family visit suggests a bit of frantic planning, and that includes cleaning, putting away, and large-scale organizing. But even those things didn’t throw us entirely into a tailspin of anger and recrimination. Quite the contrary. We set up a mirror for Wendy so that she can see the effect of her dress up proclivities. Cowry shell necklace? Looks great with Hello Kitty necklace, Hello Kitty bracelet, and random sunglasses put on upside down. But really, just looking at herself makes her giggle—an insight I think we would all do well to embrace.

After the scrubbing and organizing, we thought it would be good to open a mellow, quick game, so we returned to R-Eco and actually played a game (box scan by livinus). As I had anticipated, it went quick. Twenty minutes? Half an hour? And we mostly hovered around the negative score range. So, unlike Forbidden where a 150 point game might go three hands, we ended up with a -3 to 9 score at the end of countless rounds.

Here’s the theme: you’re a refuse-management company bringing recyclables to one of four factories. You drop off your material, pick up processed material (maybe even the same kind of stuff), and hope that you haven’t picked up so much that you’ll be forced to pull off on the some country road and illegally contribute to someone’s “fill dirt wanted” site. The most intriguing mechanism in the game is that you never draw cards to your hand directly. The “pick up processed material” phase means that you’re always picking up cards you can see. You clearly don’t want to choose the cup in front of you, but at some point you must.

OK, so the theme is pretty pasted on. You could make this a game about gem dealers or farming, but the fact that you end up being stuck with more waste than you can deal with has a sneaky didacticism to it. And you don’t want to dump illegally for two reasons: first, you get screwed for point; second, and more thematically, who wants to dump illegally? And yet, there’s so much waste being generated…

Dana had hoped that this game was printed with recycled components, but I seriously doubt that. The copy we have was printed in China, a country with serious trouble on the environmental front, by Z-Man Games, a good company, but not one looking for LEED certification for their offices any time soon.

Fair enough. It’s the business world, the world we all live in—or at least parallel to. But in other incarnations, I’m a bit of an environmentalist, so what choices can I make? I admit that I bought the game new, so, yes, I’m a contributor to the use of petrochemical inks. but I’ll play that game for years and share it with other people. I buy a lot of other games used, so that might count for something. On a different front, I’m supporting a small business. At least two, actually, the small game company and my FLGS. But the game had to come from across the world. Not so good. The footprint I’m leaving is as large as you might expect from an American.

After Notre Dame, with it’s tight economies of cathedrals and rats, we felt crazy in the eyes but didn’t extend our discomfort beyond the game mechanics. With R-Eco, we felt the pressure of the economy as well as the larger issues of the world we live in.

Damn you, Susumu Kawasaki!

And I’m glad I walk or bike to work. Helps me work off the guilt like donuts.

Keythedral: More Wine for the Workers

Three years ago I wandered into a small game store (the eponymous The Game Shoppe) in an Air Force suburb of Omaha—Bellevue, Nebraska. I remember a summer day a lot like today, a lot of sun and blasting wind. It’s a small place, Bellevue, and barely hanging on, even with the presence of the base. Still, Dana and I needed an extra half hour to find the store front around the side of the mostly dead strip mall—one more decaying building along what must have once been Bellevue’s Miracle Mile, or whatever the Chamber of Commerce called the series of grouped stores.

The Game Shoppe offered an odd experience. A clan of young men swiveled toward Dana with the unsettling radar-lock that women expect—and loathe—in “boy space.” But the woman behind the counter leaned onto her elbows and and said, “Thanks for stopping in!” So we used her as our center of gravity and stayed away from the shelves next to the boys. After we’d spent some time browsing, she came around the counter and pointed us to a couple of titles we wouldn’t have looked at. One of those games was Keythedral. And it’s been on our shelves ever since.  

Until tonight.

I was hoping that we’d be able to get this game, in particular, onto the table. I’ve been intrigued by the mix of mechanics in this installment of the Key series: modular board (though the choices you make in the initial placement can mean a fairly good time or ninety minutes of teeth-grindingly close attention), worker placement, resource management, and some player interaction that can range from good-natured to freaking spiteful. We went with the good-natured on that last category.

A summary? First, the players place octagonal tiles—the tile-draw is random—and place one of their five numbered cottage/house tiles (start with the cottages, this is a game about self-improvement!) into the gaps formed when cardinal direction sides are joined (you get a little square space to drop your building). After the board is developed, play revolves around which workers go out to the field in which order—based on the numbers of the cottages, and the order will change based on player choice (there’s a slightly confusing mapping of the numbers one through five onto the numbers one through five that could have been solved by using the first five letters of the alphabet, but what are you going to do?). You try to send your workers out to obtain the resources you need to build the Keythedral. After that, you can do some trading, upgrade your cottage (so you can send out two workers), or fence in another player. After the Keythedral is entirely built, you score based on how much you contributed and the value of resources left in your stash. We played quickly, especially after the first two rounds, and the margin of victory was a bit of metalwork Dana had picked up at random in a trade two rounds earlier. (NB: the finished Keythedral parts always pay better than raw resources. Value added products have weight even in fantasies.)

 After a very rough couple of days, we both settled into the game with a bit of trepidation, but we both enjoyed the game. I mentioned early on that one of the sub-tasks of this project would be to improve my explanation of rules. And I think I’ve done that. The odd insistence of Keythedral on using numbers twice in a uncomfortably close proximity threw Dana off, and I think the night would have gone off the smooth rails of a mellow Saturday if I hadn’t tried very hard to reset the scenarios four and five times. One of the hard lessons of play is that the social contract writes everyone into a tight partnership around the game table. One person’s disaster might not kill the experience for everyone, but everyone should at least understand the disaster without that person needing to explain it. Your bad time is my bad time, and I need to see myself as partly responsible for that. The shape that my responsibility takes, though, might be at a level above the game mechanics. When Dana shut me out of a couple of resources, she apologized the way anyone who bears bad news apologizes—there are structures that force a decision, and the chips (sometimes literally) don’t fall your way. But she still blocked my access. And it was easy to move past that and make my next choice. You might be able to exploit the players around the tables as resources, but you’ll burn that meta-resource pretty quickly. We can’t be responsible for anyone else’s happiness or despair, true, but we can certainly make those states easier to achieve. To take this full circle, teaching is a good place to start setting the terms of the contract.   

And to go back further, a game store can dictate which contract you go home with. Or if you go home with anything at all.

As a final aside: It seems to me that game stores tend to be “boy space” (as I’ve heard a few sorts of retail store types called). I’d be interested in how universal this situation might be—and if this plays into other gender issues surrounding gaming (and when I say “gender issues” I mean a way of separating one way of thinking about how games operate in the world as separate from, let’s say, “economic issues,” though of course all these issues will get messily intertwined at some level). I’m curious to hear what other people think.