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.
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