Forest of Games

Play and Games

You can find the final version up on The Gaming Gang (and lots of other good stuff), but I'll post a rough draft to get you interested: 

I have a friend I haven’t seen in a while who hates boardgames. He wants to turn and walk purposefully away, he says, when anyone at a party or after dinner suggests opening one up. 

“I want to make things up on my own,” he says. 

The statement’s a little unfair, I think, because we all like to make stuff up on our own. We hum our own songs (especially if we can’t remember the tune of that song we’re trying to hum), tell ourselves the story of our lives in our heads, add stickers to computers, pin up photos and cartoons in our cubicles (if we’re allowed to, and we grouse and stick pins in the boss doll when we can’t). I know I’ve drifted from “making stuff up” to “changing the environment,” but the impulse feels similar—particularly if you’re in an industrialized country that’s cut spending for arts education. You do what you can with what you have.

But here’s the question I want to ask when my friend isn’t around: Where’s the play in playing games?

Roger Caillois offers continuum with two poles (he offers a lot of other ideas, too, but we’ll stick with the continuum for now): paidia and ludus. Paidia is free-play. It’s finding yourself in an empty room with a bouncy ball and a couple of paddles. If you’re me and my wife, you’d start whacking the ball around just to see where you could get it to go. Ludus adds rules. A bouncy ball, two paddles, and a line in the middle of the room; now, you have to smack the ball over the line, let it bounce twice, and not let it hit the back wall, or it’s a point. First person to…oh, ten, wins. But even that example has a lot of freedom in it. 

The games that hobbyists embrace tend toward the far side of the ludic end of the spectrum. Power Grid? 18xx? I’m still trying to respond to my friend (and a lot of other people like him) by trying to identify the sort of play he’s looking for. Maybe it’s a foolish task, but I’m willing to be a little foolish.

I’d like some help with this, but my first thought is that the play space itself is complicated. When playing the Ragnar Brothers Snow Tails or Friedemann Friese’s Fearsome Floors, I’m not alone at the table when I make husky noises during the former or mimic movie monster groans while playing the latter. The impulse to paidia is as strong as the move to the ludic. House rules, too, push the ludic structure open a bit. And then there’s the idea of gaming the game, of exploiting what are usually design flaws for an almost mechanical win.

Yes, a rules lawyer will insist on playing the game as written—especially if the lawyer is finding a way to improve their own position—but most of us, in my experience, recognize the play in the game. Of course, we are a bit peculiar, spending so much time parsing rules for how fast zombies move and talking like pirates. And it’s just fine that my friend runs away from anything not improvisational. Nevertheless, he’s missing, I think, that his activities have their own rules, and not acknowledging that fact makes the play a bit less interesting. 

 

Crokinole, the Review

Over on The Gaming Gang. The basic version is here (but it's prettier with pictures):

Game Name: Crokinole
Designer: Public Domain
Publisher: Various, Mayday Games
Year: 1860s
Players: 2 (four in a partnership game)
Ages: 6+
Playing time: 30 mintues
Retail: $100+

Contents:
14 natural disks
14 black disks
storage box with score track on lid
2 scoring pegs
eight wooden posts
eight metal screws and a length of surgical tubing (if you want highly reactive bumpers)
crokinole board

I remember moments in elementary school and junior high when the teachers would come to the end of their lesson—or patience—and we would be free to follow our own interests. As long as we stayed in our seats. You could easily push the edge of this caveat by spinning around to see if your buddy behind you already had a sheet of paper out (not pulled raggedly from a spiral notebook, you hoped) and was folding it carefully into a triangular football. I can’t easily explain why the flicking that ensued was so enthralling, but the rest of the class simply vanished. Until one or the other of us flicked the extra point too hard and hit someone in the head. The teacher’s sudden yell would make you think you’d put out one of Laura Miller’s blue eyes. The football would vanish into the teacher’s desk, and we’d all have to turn our chairs around and keep both feet on the floor.

When you consider the appeal of flicking things (there’s also the grade school tradition of flicking ears, but that’s designed for cruelty, and I really don’t think Laura Miller was hurt by that paper triangle), it’s no wonder that quite a number of flicking games evolved out of folk traditions. A particular flicking game that has a lot of new buzz going for it—amazing, considering that the origins go back to the mid-nineteenth century—is crokinole. The buzz is around the new Mayday Games boards, but I’ll give a brief overview before I return to the new boards (one of which I own—w00t!—not to give away the tone of my review).

Crokinole is a simple game, as you’d expect because of its folk origins. The playing surface is a circle a little over two feet across. Three concentric circles mark the scoring areas—if you have disks left in those rings after a round. At the center of the board is a recessed circle just slightly larger than the disks. That’s the sweet spot. Sink a piece in the hole and you get twenty points. You get fifteen for keeping a piece in the center circle, though that task is made trickier by the eight posts along the line marking that circle. And if your disk straddles a line? Take the lower points. The middle ring is ten points. Outer ring is worth five. And then there’s a little neutral area between the line marking the outer ring and the ditch (for keeping flicked disks from zinging into the Cheetos, and storing zero-scoring disks). That little area? Worth nothing. So make sure your disks don’t drift to the edge.

On your turn, you flick. That outer ring is broken into quadrants, and you have to rest your disk on the line of the outer ring and within your quadrant. You can cheat a little bit over the line, but not too much. If the playing area’s clear, you go for the twenty…and you have to have your disk stay in the fifteen circle. Or it comes back out and goes into the ditch. If your opponent has a piece on the board, you have to make contact with it, though you can use combination shots to accomplish this goal. If you don’t make contact with one of your opponent’s pieces, then the piece you shot—and all of your own pieces that you touched—come off into the ditch. That can be a lot of pain. When all the disks have been played, tally the points. Subtract low from high, and give the difference to winner of the round; the opponent scores zero. First person to an agreed-upon total—usually 100—wins.

I’ve got to mention the one-cheek rule: you can’t move your chair during play, and you always have to have one cheek on the seat. Did I mention the folk origins?

The game is simple, delightful fun. Play is quick, and you can easily fall into either a deep silence or a constant stream of chatter back and forth. The boards are eye-catching, and if you have the space to have one set up in a corner for a game day, it’s a great way to keep late-comers occupied until the current longer game(s) come to an end. Of course, if you don’t like dexterity games, stay away.

Back to the buzz. A decent crokinole board has, until recently, required either a woodshop and well-developed skills or a serious outlay of cash to get someone with a woodshop and skills to make one for you. Of course, the boards that people like the Hilinskis andWillard assemble are heirloom quality. Mayday Games, though, has been working on a plan to bring decent, relatively inexpensive crokinole boards to North America. And they have succeeded. I was in the first wave of people to receive one of these boards, and I have been pleased with the product. Are there weird little things with the board? Yes. A couple of little pimples. The lines that mark the rings are painted on top of the finish of the playing surface. The pegs are a little…uneven. And the lacquer of the ditch has some seriously ugly sections. Mostly, these issues are cosmetic, and others can be dealt with by applying a bit of judicious force or a couple coatings of wax. Other purchasers have not been so lucky; there have been issues with shipping as well as the product. Mayday Games, though, have been absolutely stellar in their customer service, and I suspect that their quality control will improve as they take these complaints back to the manufacturer.

Here’s the kicker: the Mayday Games boards cost half or a quarter what the heirloom boards do. A fabulous price for a very fine product. And a lot more fun to flick around with than a paper football.

Game Day Reflections

OK, the pretty stuff is over at The Gaming Gang. But you can read the basic stuff here.

I ended a recent post by noting that games can be used as markers of life. We can remember (hazily) the times in college when we played hack-n-slash D&D as a drinking game (and what ever happened to the people we were dating at the time?). But at other moments, our lives and world are sufficiently memorable. I hosted a game day on a recent Saturday, the 11th of September. We didn’t spend a lot of time talking about what that date meant, but we also couldn’t avoid it.

There’s not really a good transition after that topic, and yet we have to keep going. So I think the point here is that we bring the rest of our lives with us to the game table, and that the rest of the people around the game table—old friends or relative strangers—will bring a lot of their lives with them, too. Perhaps their grandmother just got arrested for shoplifting, or they had three tons of gravel delivered to their house due to a typo on an order form. Whatever’s going on, you, the host, need to keep things running smoothly, and I admit that I’ve not always been good about maintaining that smoothness. Still, a bit of roughness here and there shouldn’t grind your game day to a halt.

The recent Owl House Game Day is a pretty good example of how an event can go. One player showed up at the early start time, and I was glad that I had set out my Crokinole board. We spent some time flicking disks and chatting about life. I don’t want to brag about my astonishingly fast reflexes, but I assure you that if it weren’t for espresso-turboed muscle twitching I’d be wearing an eyepatch right now. I’m drinking rum in honor of that non-existent patch. Other players showed up over the next few hours, and we ended up with six altogether. Not a bad number. But part of my role during the event was to make introductions and to keep the conversational ball in the air (a volleyball, not football, metaphor) during slow points and between games. It’s wonderfully useful to have games to talk about, and that certainly helps to keep the conversation moving.

Like many other game days, once everyone was in place we played a lot of different titles over the course of the evening. Chrononauts (an easy game to stop and re-start), Werewolf (on the iPad…an interesting experience), Forbidden Island (we died twice), and a late game of Bohnanza (without a single fart joke).

And I had an insight just before the rest of the guests wended their ways past the plants on the front porch and into the house: don’t explain all the games, give space to the people around you. Make sure that they get to play one of the games they brought, or at least get to explain a game that you own but they might have played more. I’m learning this lesson because I have a toddler in my life, and one of the ways to make her happy is to give her autonomy (or the illusion of autonomy—we’re very Orwellian, my wife and I, in cultivating this particular illusion). I’ve noticed that I, too, am happier when I get to make meaningful choices and when I contribute—again, meaningfully—in my community (and I’m thinking family, workplace, neighborhood, and so on). When gamers come over to play games at your house, remember that the issue at stake is not you and your house. The issue is fun. And games.

But do make sure have enough to eat and drink.

Flick, Yes!

That's my new post up at The Gaming Gang. I'll drop the text here for you, but you should click over to the Gang to see the pictures.

I can remember two very lucky moments in gaming. The first was when I rolled two natural twenties in a row in a game of Gamma World that let me bluff my way into a quonset hut. That I managed to pull off the improbable feat sent my GM into a deep funk. I think I was denied any useful treasure for several sessions.

The second bit of luck came in 1991. I found a guy, Billy Stevens, selling carrom boards in Durham, NC. I can’t remember now how I initially made contact with him, but I attended a carrom get-together that he hosted every week at a pub not far from the Durham Bulls’ baseball field. I became deeply enamored of the game, but I was also working in a small video rental shop, and my hours fluctuated wildly, so I was only able to attend the game days sporadically.

But we’re not to the lucky part yet.

That spring a lot of buzz started to develop around a project put together by Jane’s Addiction’s frontman, Perry Farrell. A concert/festival was going to go on tour, an event he was calling Lollapalooza. The project was making a stop at the new Walnut Creek on the outskirts of Raleigh, and my friends immediately bought tickets when they went on sale. I abstained. The job, you know? And then the day before the show, Billy Stevens walks into the store and asks if I’d like to go to Lollapalooza. He had rented space for displaying and selling carrom boards, and he needed people to staff the booth. My manager overheard the conversation and insisted that I go. So, early the next morning, I drove to Billy’s house, packed up carrom boards, and headed with a few of his friends to Lollapalooza. I spent the day drinking beer we’d smuggled in (to avoid the concession prices), playing carrom, and wandering over to the stage to watch the acts.

I mention these stories not to focus so much on luck—that bane of gamers—but to set up my love of flicking games and other table-top dexterity games (we’ll skip over my deep and abiding interest in pool). Because of this interest, my wife pre-ordered a Mayday Games Crokinole board for me in order to celebrate my recent graduation. I’ve been flicking the little disks around daily since it was delivered. (As an aside, Mayday seems to have some quality control issues with this first round of boards, but mine arrived unscathed and in good shape.) And I want to point out that games are not your life. It makes me a little uneasy to say that, but it’s true. But it’s true in the way that photographs are not your life, much as Kodak would love to advertise to you the exact opposite claim. Like photos, though, you can construct snapshots of your life through games, while remembering that it’s important to focus on the life and the stories.

And if you’re in town, stop by and flick some disks.

So, Who's Coming Over?

I have another post up over at the Gaming Gang. You should go check it out. But I'll let you read it here, too.

Every month I send out a call to a small group of people to remind them that Owl House Game Day is coming up. I’m thinking about this issue now because the call should go out in the next few days. I’m also thinking about it because Jeff posted a piece about gaming pet peeves, and a lot of the peeves are about behaviors during game days. Usually, pieces like mine here tend to focus on what Jeff culled from BGG: the bad behavior of other gamers (or people resisting playing games) and how to deal with that behavior when it arises. You can find a lot of that kind of material over on the ‘Geek, though you might have to dig for it. What I’d like to do is write about how to develop an invitation list.

I know that the temptation is to host a gala, a fabulous event centered on your hobby that will seduce doubters, haters, cheerleaders, and longshoremen. At least, that’s my fantasy. Without the longshoremen, maybe. Unless they bring Kaivai or Flower Power. Nevertheless, the temptation to invite friends, relatives, co-workers over to your home—be it ever so humble or a sprawling mansion—and show them the power of play and the elegance of contemporary rules is strong.

Like many other lone voices traveling in wildernesses, resist temptation.

Start slow. You don’t have to have a brilliant day of gaming delight for your first event. A few friends will suffice. But here’s the key question: which friends?

So now we’re going to back up to the very first step in hosting a game day (after you’ve purchased some games, but since you’re here at The Gaming Gang reading this—and you have a pulse—I’ll take it as read that you have games), and that first step is judging the interest level of the people around you. In the awkward space I call my head, I have a continuum of gamers which I’ll parcel out in a convenient set of four. First, “Aren’t games for children?” Second, “I love Cranium and The Game of Life!” Third, “A friend of ours has a game with little trains that you put down after you have the right cards, oh, and something like Settled Cans? And that’s fun, too.” Fourth, “I have Arkham Horror set up on my dining room table, and now I have to organize the bits so I can set up Twilight Imperium instead.”

Of course, category one is a bit of an outlier as is category four (and an obvious invitee, unless you deem their social/hygiene skills to be lacking). Mostly, you’ll run into people who fit in the very murky middle ground of two and three, but they’re the group that far outnumbers the others, and you’ll probably need to invite some of them. But which people? I know this suggestion will be difficult, but it’s required: you must talk to them.

When you’re talking to people in those two groups, ask them about their childhood experiences. Did they always only play party games? Did they have a wacky relative who taught them to play Acquire? Were they in the chess club? Did they do a study abroad in Japan and get addicted to Go? Or maybe then went to Germany, but can’t find those games here? I’m throwing a lot of questions out, but what I am suggesting here is that you listen. My own family played a lot of games when I was growing up. We’d receive them as presents, or we’d play with relatives or friends. I played Chess and Backgammon with my parents and brother, and we had a good time. Just this year, I learned that my dad played a wide variety of games with his friends (Twixt and Gusher were two we talked about), and the interest and skills he developed have stayed with him into his 60s. So ask your friends and family. Did they always have a good time playing games? If not, why not? From these conversations, develop a short list of people you think would enjoy learning new games. Let me point out that “learning” is a key term. If you hear in your discussions that someone had two games that they were content to play obsessively, then you might want to keep looking. And you can continue to keep looking once the core group is established, but you may find that all of you are content with the dynamic you’ve set up. In that case, you can settle in and try to play more games than you purchase. To which I say, good luck!

There are other considerations, of course. You might want theme days (games by only one designer or company, games with similar mechanisms, games with particular themes, etc.). You’ll want to set up expectations about what to bring, including what kinds of food and drink are acceptable at your table (and you can arrange the space in ways that suggests where cups, bottles, and cans might be comfortably placed), and what sort of child care is or is not available. And you’ll want to set up boundaries. “This is the room with whirling knives; do not go in there.” “Here are all the Bibles I read throughout the day.” “Here’s my copy of the Anarchist Cookbook.” But these are details about which the good Geeks have a lot to say.

Developing a gaming group is an intensely social experience. Take your time. But don’t stress it too much. These other people who play games? They’re your species.