Accounting? I took my confusions to the department accountant who looked at the paperwork—not from me, from the university—and freaked out. It’s always nice to know that your confusion is based in actually confusing data and not some simple misunderstanding:
“James, you see this two here?”
“Yes.”
“Added to the next two, you get four.”
“Oh, I see…”
Nothing so simple, so while I’ve been grinding my teeth down from the one pip to the six, I’m happy—in a muted, “I feel much better now that the hammer blows have stopped” kind of way.
And on the home front, the day was pooptacular. Dana put Wendy down for her morning nap—I’m a bit unsure of the exact timeline, but I’ll try to recreate it:
Pooping.
Early Houdini inspiration and experiment.
Interpretive fecal art.
Freak out over the power of art.
Wailing over the baby monitor summons Dana.
Another freak out over the power of art.
And then much scrubbing, bathing, and a round of high temperature, very agitated washing of the love bear.
I was apprised of this after the fact, and I was happy to be exploring the ways that my institution has retrofitted the 21st century into the 19th century for accounting. A “negative expense” counts as positive, but not as income?
After I cycled home, we talked about how games work for us, our particular emotional states, and how
we can continue with the project—for a mere eight days more. We also explored Dana’s relationship to abstraction versus theme as well as our collective frustration with the Ragnar Brothers.
I had prepped both for R-Eco and Theophrastus. I didn’t expect us to go for R-Eco, though the (pasted-on) theme is resonant for us (you’re a refuse-managing company trying to recycle material). The game reduces to hand-management and tactics—fun and quick, yes—with some tricky, Knizia-inspired scoring. We’re both looking forward to playing it, perhaps when my parents are here next week. So we settled in for Theophrastus, a game I had picked up in a BoardGameGeek auction about the time Wendy was born.
Neither one of us can remember who won the first game we played (photos by phrim). Dana remembers being sore and exhausted, and it was not a good thing that we were perched on the low wooden stools that we used at
the breakfast nook in our previous apartment (just catty-corner from where we live now, but that’s another story). She remembers the peasant bread we had, the very bread I used to make turkey, cranberry sauce, and horseradish sandwiches. Despite the discomfort, and perhaps in loyalty to the sandwiches, she was happy to sit down to a game of alchemical pattern-matching.
Theophrastus works like this: in each of three rounds an alchemical recipe (if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor) is laid out. The recipe has three categories: metals, elements, and essentials. Some of each may be determined, but more likely is a vague descriptor like “3 metals.” As the Theophrastus token moves around, the player in that role adds a metal (or element…you get the idea), and the other players (coming back to the Theo player) lay down matching cards—or cards that at least match the category—in their own corresponding spaces. You determine scores each time Theophrastus completes his recipe; you score better the closer you come to the cards that were laid down for him.
I had a hard time matching the cards he had in the second round, so I dropped too far back to recover. I
also tried to exploit some game strategies that would work better in a multi-player game (there are ways to hide information, for instance, and other ways to meddle with your opponents). Those were not good choices, given the person with whom I was playing.
We came out of the game…pretty happy, really. We even took a look at the gameplay for R-Eco afterward. After a crisis, the resolution, no? I want to talk about Chinese printing of games, of petroleum-based inks and the Gulf of Mexico, but we didn’t get to R-Eco, not really. So is there a lesson to take from Theophrastus? I could shoehorn a meaning about transformation, maybe, about combinations of influences and reactions into the evening, but that idea sounds forced at best. I could even write about the happy accidents of early science that led us to the technologies that enabled humans to develop these games. But I have to think that it’s really about a woman and a man, a husband and wife, partners, finding the space within themselves for generosity to expand around the hard nut of resentment and frustration so that it opens and transforms. Do games allow for this? A project any couple or group might hold in their collective imaginations? “It’s the goal that is important, not the winning.”
If I sit down with you with a board between us, what will I learn?
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