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.