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.
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