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.
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