Forest of Games

The Alchemy of Games: Theophrastus

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?

The Monastery of Frustration

Lucky-the-rescued-feral-cat is rocketing around the house chasing things ranging from the other house cats, to feathered toys, to his own tail and/or shadow. His silver-blue markings make him blend in with any pattern in the house so that it starts to seem like he’s just chasing himself. And then he’ll stop and put his head down like he’s considering exactly that possibility.

And then he’s off again. I’m hoping for moths, this time. They’re a tasty, powdery treat for a cat, and worth the effort to catch them, no?

One issue I’ve mentioned recently is the ruleset for Monastery. I’ve been working for the last few days to organize the things so that they make sense. And we still took forty-five minutes at the beginning of our session to figure out a couple of issues. So having Wendy go to bed early—long day, including vaccinations—was about the only thing that made this game playable. Still, it was a testy game and a study in frustration.

What’s truly bizarre about the rules is that the game isn’t all that complicated. It’s on a par with Carcassonne with one expansion, or maybe two. You place a tile (some basic rules apply, e.g., a path has to connect to another path), you move your monk(s) (two places for each standing monk, can’t travel over an unconstructed tile), you score for resources. The buildings that pay out differ based on which round you’re in, and then you use the points to buy game-winning tiles, another monk, or blessings. If the situation is right, you can pray in a complete building for extra points, though you lose any more scoring or movement abilities. And yet, in nine pages of rules, it’s hard to strip out the useful bits—in the right order.

Just an example of weird rules diction: under Tile Placement, the first sentence reads “During Placement and movement a player may place one new tile.” Just a few problems: 1. “placement and movement”? Aren’t we just talking about placement?, 2. “may”? You have a choice?, 3. at the end of the section it says that you can do a swap with tiles in the bag, but the “may” in both sections implies that a player may keep their tiles (though you get points docked at the end for leftover tiles), 4. and the rules seek to clarify this point at the very end of the section?

You might imagine that I’m inhabiting some whinging geek with a tendency toward cattiness, but I really only mean to point out that there are subtle bits of misdirection and miscommunication throughout these rules. The gray circles of study buildings and the bible-like clip-art aren’t brought together graphically in the rules. Again, the effect is subtle, and I fear that you end up feeling like you’re at a magic show: “I thought the rule about the woman being sawn in half was over here…”

Still, I’m intrigued by the game. Once it clicked into place, though, I was losing and couldn’t recover. We both had our good and bad rounds, and it was clear that you sometimes had to take a bad round to set up a better round later. Another issue may be that the game doesn’t really play well with two people. So I’d give it another spin. I can imagine working through this one over a long time.

But our frustration with the rules and our difficulty finding the rhythm of the game left us both feeling edgy. It’s been a fairly hairy week at work, and I’m not looking forward to another day of accounting. So it was easy for me to snap and pick at Dana. She’s been enduring this experiment with good humor, but I keep wanting us both to relax into a sort of intellectual dance that we can both enjoy. Yet the semester’s barreling toward us, she’s having a hard time getting her work done, I’m drawing her away from her own leisure pursuits, and—as pop culture would have it—she’s just not that into it. I’ll add quickly that she is engaged by the larger project. But the way there? Toil and study. And a modicum of frustration.

You can listen to Doug Garrett and Shelley talk about Monastery here (start around 16:25). And you should check out their podcast anyway.

Truckin' with a Ticket to Ride

A bit of excitement came howling through on Tuesday night. The tornado sirens started wailing around eleven. Dana snapped her book shut and said, “Do we have to take Wendy into the basement?”

“No,” I assured her, “the sirens could be for Roca. Let’s just let it go.”

No tornadoes whipped through, if that’s what you’re worrying about. And it would have been far more dangerous to go to the basement. The detritus of many generations of our landlady’s kin molder in our basement, feeding an untold multitude of insects, spiders, and more unsettling vermin best not imagined. The air is like something you’d imagine smelling in a horror movie when you’re happy that it’s just popcorn and syrup that’s actually oozing on the floor.

On Wednesday, Marianne and Dave came over again. She carried a bowl of homemade baba ganoush and he carried a bag of pita chips. A very game-friendly choice of snack.

I was sorting out the pieces to Ticket to Ride when they came in, unfolding the large board on the dining room table. I had picked up the 1910 expansion, so we were able to sit down with cards that looked and felt like regular playing cards. The mini cards that come with the game are fun, and they work really well on small tabletops, but the larger cards feel more substantial. 

My guess is that you probably know the game, or have at least heard of it by now. It’s Alan Moon’s big title, and SdJ winner, and a breakout success that reaches beyond the hobby niche about which I’m mostly writing (photo here by firepigeon). But if you don’t know the game, it goes something like this: you’re collecting sets (see what I mean about mechanisms in games working in many ways?) of colored railroad car cards in order to claim routes between cities. On a turn you can pick up two cards (though only one wild card), lay down your color of rail car as markers, or draw a new route card. And it’s these route cards that determine what cities you’ll connect—the route cards give you extra points at the end, or they chip away at your total if you fail to connect the cities.

 It’s not a long game, and not very complicated. Dave and Marianne braved the first couple of turns in spite of a bit of confusion, but the strategy and structure made sense pretty quickly, it seemed (photo by kilroy_locke). I didn’t restate the game ending conditions as we were getting toward the end, and in so doing kinda screwed Dave out of his last ticket—and extra points. But he took the situation in good humor.

And then we pushed back, talked about the game, and found ourselves talking about gambling (I had hoped to talk about the concept of “gateway games” but what the hell). We ranged from the history of gambling and lotteries (“a tax on people who can’t do math”) and onto observations of our parents and mentors behaving in revealing and disturbing ways when they made their way to gambling meccas. While the little group of us is pretty ambitious and competitive, we’re also fairly risk-averse. Or, rather, we’re devoted to cost-benefit analysis, and straight-up gambling lands squarely on wrong side of any analysis.

We also took some time to talk about being Southerners and how that marks us, what assumptions people make about who we are. And we talked a bit about the nature of competition, how to keep it healthy, how the notion of play works in the competitive setting. That topic keeps coming up, and I wonder how hard it is to find the balance between sociality and the drive to win. Of course, that’s a balance that I’m looking for, but others might not care and be very happy at either end of the spectrum.

I’m sad to report that Dave came in last. But in the caboose? Pandas.

Forbidden: Collecting Sets and Weather

The announcer keeps breaking into the music to announce a plague of storms stomping across the state, but well to the west of us. The scale of Nebraska is such that wild weather in, say, Cherry County, means that only thirteen-striped ground squirrels, prairie chickens, grasshoppers, and one human being per square mile. This is a solitary county that is, by itself, larger than Connecticut, Rhode Island, or Delaware. And you thought there was nothing to do in Delaware? My friends, you can run a string of tornadoes through there and only rustle the grass—and maybe blowout the top of a sandhill.

On the other hand, it’s beautiful country.

Here at the house, the evening chirrs along to the throb of cicadas who must be as uncomfortable as we are in the unusually high humidity. It feels more like being back in Georgia. But we have our aging AC to keep us moderated, and sequence of fans to move the air in cooling patterns. Cooling enough that we could set our elbows on the felt and not feel scratchy.

We sat down tonight with a light card game, Forbidden. The game was designed by Philip Orbanes, an author, game designer, and generally shrewd dude of the games industry (I recommend his book on Parker Bros.). Orbanes was clearly under the influence of Mahjong when he put this set-collecting game together—or maybe he’d just had a lot of Chinese take-out and green tea. Either way, the game features characters from the Chinese zodiac, the classic red envelope, and a few of the traditional characters of Chinese myth and folklore (e.g., Monkey—another book well worth reading).

I mention set-collecting because it’s one of the basic mechanics of games that shows up in many different games and guises. Needs runs of named cards in Thurn & Taxis? Need all of one kind (or some pattern) in Set, Abracadabra, Falfalia…. Oh the list is too long. But if you’ve played Gin or Rummy, you know what I’m describing.

Raise your hand if you know how to play Gin or Rummy… That’s what I thought. So it’s curious to the point of dumbfounded silence that Dana didn’t play either of those games until we met. My family, though with a strong religious background, had several decks of cards and enjoyed set-collecting games. Dana’s family didn’t play cards much at all. Her brothers played War, a sorry excuse for a game (though you can use the basic mechanism of “my numbers beat your numbers” in interesting ways). She confessed that she doesn’t even know how to deal out a basic game of solitaire.

My own confession: I can’t play poker. I understand the mechanics, but the hands make no particular sense to me. If I sat down and thought about them—I’m guessing that ranking them by rarity and not by type would help—I could get it, but it’s not a game my family played. Still, I understand the “I don’t want these, I’ll see what’s left in the deck” mechanic, and I understand how betting works (or, if you will, auction).

In other words, we come back to literacy. What do you know? What do you have experience with? How can you bootstrap those skills or that knowledge

—weather alert: tornado and baseball-sized hail… baseball-sized… I’ll let that sink into your imagination—

or that knowledge into a new situation? So, for me, the rules and play of Forbidden made sense almost at the intuitive level. You have three suits with four of each number 2-5, 7 & 8 and a total of four of a 6/9 card (the yin-yang card—worth extra points). Sets and runs, yes, and a couple of special cards that affect play and scoring. Going out on your turn scores you extra, those not going out don’t get penalized except with a few special cards. Play a new hand until someone hits a certain number of points—150 in a two-player game. I sped to 100 points in two hands, and then Dana scored 90 in the last hand to win the game. Forbidden is light, a bit chaotic, and well worth the price.

I also learned, in addition to the dearth of card games in her past, that Dana’s “I’m uneasy” and her “I’m deeply concentrating” affects bear a strong resemblance to each other. I have been misreading her moods, and that misreading has colored my own experience the last few nights. It’s hard to underestimate how fatigue at the end of a day can set your Spidey-sense tingling just because there’s baseball-sized hail three hundred miles away. I’ll make one last painfully obvious observation: it would be a hell of a lot easier to watch TV for thirty days. Somehow, I think I’d know a lot less about Dana, though I would have something to add to the conversation about Lost.

NB: If you’d like to hear a detailed discussion of Forbidden, go check out the episode of The Spiel’s podcast in which they take a look at the game. In fact, just go check out The Spiel.

Another weather update. Tell me about gaps in your gaming experience while the rain pounds down?

Player V. Player: Forbidden Gaming

Komment Kat rightly points out an excellent cartoon about cooperative gaming over at PvP, a topic I toyed around with while also toying around with gaming literacy. But go. Check out Scott Kurtz (a friend of a friend, it turns out, though Kurtz and I have never met).

Oh, and if you qualify to vote for his comic for this award, please do so. The strip never fail to elicit at least a grin and a chuckle. And more than occasional laughter. 

And buy his other stuff, too. It's how the man makes his living.

Monastic Plumbing

I’m working on a reference sheet for a game. Usually, I use BoardGameGeek as a resource for this sort of item, but for whatever reason, Monastery has not inspired a lot of extra geekery. I’ve spent about an hour, cumulatively, massaging a small document from another player into shape.

There’s a temptation when doing work that seems intuitive—writing, working with pipes and wires, etc—to imagine that there’s not really that much to whatever task is at hand.

“Look,” you might say, standing over a sink whose U-bend has developed what appears to be torrential flop-sweat, “it can’t be that hard. The water comes up from there, goes here, comes out there, and drains here.” The fact that this description requires you essentially to genuflect doesn’t trouble you at first. But six hours and eight trips to the hardware store later, your cursing has finally surpassed your blood pressure which, in turn, is only surpassed by the power of the stream of water power-washing the inside of your cabinet.

I mean to say this: hire a goddam pro. Do it early and count yourself lucky.

The parallel I’m angling toward has to do with language. Which is a lot trickier than the crowded history of building codes and practices (“How in god’s name is this pipe metric?!” you will be screaming at the hardware store guy who’s already thinking about his date that evening, “Are you telling me they shipped all this copper from Quebec?” You will get a shrug that, transposed several thousand miles, would easily be described as Gallic).

Sentences will escape you. You will lose the sense of your point. What should come next? Should you write exactly what the developer sent you or rewrite it? Maybe start from the top and imagine yourself a middle-aged guy in Nebraska with a manic toddler (I’ll just let you know: mania=exhaustion), an impending visit from friends, and a wife and gaming partner who’s starting to get a bit stressed out about the state of her work.

My advice to the game publisher in this predicament: Hire an editor.

Let’s take a step into my past: During my academic career, I took a class on Theories of Language. It was a kind of intro to and meta-conversation about linguistics. Fabulous class. I still have a good friend who came from among the other students. But I learned that there’s a whole genus of academic who’s devoted to understanding how language works. It just so happens—in a point of delicious irony—that the institution was looking to hire a poet that same semester. One of the poets, during their job talk (academics get to do a reading/dog-and-pony show as well as three days of interviews), responded to a question about how she was using language in a particular poem by saying, “Well, I have a theory about language, I think it…” She went on, but I was appalled that she hadn’t done any research into how  language might actually work.

OK, thank you for the indulgence. But, really: hire an editor.

I’m really going to try for brevity, here.

Our friends didn’t show, which is fine. Long day, lots of chaos. But I was on edge with the rulebook work on Monastery and Dana seemed pretty stressed out and very much not into the game thing. So we opened San Juan, a game we have some passing familiarity with (full game photo by mothertruckin, cards by Aldaron). And it’s well worth engaging. You’re trying to build the city of San Juan, playing cards to build buildings, produce goods, and sell goods for more cards. The triple use of the cards (played down as buildings, buildings paid for with cards that are  doled out face down, and resources that come straight off the draw pile) might take a couple of rounds to get used to, but it streamlines the materials and play. And during the game we started to feel a little better, though I still have a guilty feeling about pulling Dana over to do this. I don’t like feeling guilty; it makes me grumpy. And then it’s hard to have a good, open conversation about what we might do tomorrow night after the girl is put to bed and we roll out the sky-blue felt onto the table.

Kingsburg and the Gaming Community

We had guests scheduled for Sunday evening—guests whose interests in games is probably low—so we tried to figure out how to deal with this project. A game while Wendy naps? Assume that our guests will leave early and get a short game in after? Invite them into a game? As we near the end of the project and get closer to the school year beginning, the tension between career, job, and gaming heightens. And I’ve very much enjoyed sitting down at our dining room table after we’ve picked up the little toy people, stowed the trucks and Mr. Potato Heads, stuffed the plushies back into their bags. The rule books come out, the felt gets drifted onto the table, we snap the boards down, and Dana and I build stories together. And one of us wins.

But Sunday was a problem. We have a couple of Friendly Local Game Stores (FLGS) in Lincoln, and I felt sure that there must be a game day—or something like game day—at one of them. One store, Gauntlet Games, has open boardgaming on Sunday (Hobbytown USA caters to the collectibles crowd, and Comic World…is it’s own little demesne). A little after noon, then, I thumped the hood on our Scion Xa (to startle any feral cats that might have crawled up into the car—I’m sure the tune-up guys laugh at the cat prints on our engine block), rolled down the windows to let the hot(ter) air out, and left Dana and Wendy to read books and go for a walk.

Gauntlet Games is in the corner of a working class neighborhood strip mall. Also in the strip mall is a slowly asphyxiating IGA, a tattoo parlor, a Chinese take-out place with an LED sign telling me that it’s July ;1, [291 and 8:20:29 AM, a New Age bookstore, a coin-op laundry, an insurance agent, an auction agent, and a pub—set way back in the elbow of the L-shaped building. To sum up, the mall is not inviting. The game shop itself is a bit dusty, particularly around some of the more elaborate models and standees that are carefully placed around the store. The front third or so is devoted to commerce: boardgames, RPGs, Warhammer 40k, a few books and used magazines from the heyday of print RPG extras. The next two-thirds has a couple of tall tables with miniatures games terrain, several conference tables with battered folding chairs, a games library, and many forgotten cubbies along with an abandoned, beige computer tentacled with wires. A door in the back wall leads to a split level. Up takes you to the Warhammer room, down takes you to mops and the water closet.

The website said that gaming started at noon, but the one really friendly guy (whose name escapes me) said that the store opens at noon and it takes the guys a while to settle down for a game. So I drifted around, chatting with the guys about games. I was introduced to Brad, Martin, Marty, and Scott. Around twelve thirty, one of them settled at a conference table with a copy of Kingsburg, a game I like, and we started to parcel out the bits for a game (full game shot by endou_kenji).

I’ll admit to you here that I played innocent. “Do you know this game?”

“I’ve played it, but it’s been a while.” (True)

“Do you need a refresher on the rules?”

Martin saved me, “I do.”

And so we began. These were all very nice men. All in their fifties, or close to it. One or another might have been about my age (we attracted an audience member toward the end who looked about Dana’s age or younger, his quiff suggested maybe a bit younger). They were all heavy-set and had managed to lose their hair in exactly the same pattern. One or more might have had a moment or two of AP during the game, but mostly we moved pretty steadily. And they were quite generous. Not in their play; if they wanted a position that would disadvantage another player, they just took it. The generosity came when a player knew they’d been blocked—‘hey, that’s just the game’—or if someone saw a better move just after they’d moved their piece—we let them change their play. I ended up in a respectable second place, and we spent a couple of minutes talking about the flow of the game as we put the pieces back into their bags and then into the box.

Two things to talk about: first, the game. Second, the group.

Kingsburg is a dice game, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun (dice and small board photos by BaSL). The game has a similar mechanic to Airships. Dice are your gateway to resources. In this game, each of you has a set of dice in your own color. Everyone rolls simultaneously with the lowest roll then going first. You have a chart of eighteen characters (numbered 1-18) on which you can place your dice; once you’re on that spot, you get that resource, and you block anyone from getting that resource. You can combine your dice however you see fit: the grand total, or any group of two, or a series of solo die. You then collect resources, maybe build a building, and you do all of this in order to push up your victory points. The design of the game is such that if you don’t get the extra tasty bits offered by the high end, you can get a lot of basic resources at the bottom end (that is, single die generate a lot of basic stuff, or you can combine them for a bit of the more subtle stuff—like information). It’s a lot of fun as long as you don’t get too committed to one course of action.

Now the group was pretty much exactly what you’d expect for this hobby in the States. But a couple of interesting other people wandered in. An African-American man carrying a large custom bag jingled the front door while we were playing and zipped past us into the Warhammer room. An Hispanic man followed him a little later. A couple of families came in for Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! play. But mostly it was white men. Now, as a white man, this is blindingly comfortable. But as someone who values interaction with people not like me, the situation felt odd.

I don’t think that this demographic was arranged by the store owner, his business partners, and regular customers. The people I met were all very warm. The children were cooed over and bantered with—and, tellingly, never talked down to.

“Hey, Cameron, you’re back. I guess your mom found you last week.”

“It wasn’t my mom. It was my aunt Joanie.”

“Oh. Cool. But you’re back.”

Cameron proudly hoists his Pokemon box.

People bought snacks, drinks, new games, new figures, and brought their stuff by the table to talk to the guys I was playing with. The space felt like a loose community built, as most are, by shared interests. It might have been church, except for the dice and swearing. And like church, the people wanted to make sure that you shared their convictions. Or at least were in the same time zone of dogma.

As I think about gamers and communities of gamers, I think of the iconic images of African-American elders playing dominoes, of old people of all kinds playing Bingo, of my mom and our neighbors playing Yahtzee by the hour, of groups of Chinese people gathered around Shogi, of my former mother-in-law and her Bridge group. And this is before we talk about Mahjong, Chess, Checkers, Go… It’s a question—about communities and other groups and what they play—that I would like to know more about. I don’t have time to do the research now, but if you have any leads, would you let me know?

Blue Moon City: Choice, Art, and a Couple of Dragons

Sometimes you just have to embrace a fantasy. And so we did. After a day of chasing a toddler, catching boogers, and generally maintaining house, home, body, and soul, we sat down to a game of Blue Moon City. (The picture to the right is from Oopsiak.) 

I’m not sure how many Reiner Knizia designs we’ve played already (Ingenious is the obvious earlier entry), but we encounter him again here. Blue Moon City felt more open than Notre Dame, which is a bit like saying that the Nebraska capitol building is a bit taller than Luke Lavender’s 1860 cabin three blocks away.

In this Knizia game, you lay out a slightly cross-shaped grid of tiles—the layout can be different each game. You have a deck of cards with values from one to three. The one- and two-value cards offer special powers (movement of your piece or one of the dragons, changing the color of the cards you play, all kinds of things). The three card is just a heavy resource. On a turn, you move, play cards to contribute to a building (with scoring possibilities), draw back up, and hand the turn to the player on your left. You need to consider how the cards work, what each building offers, and push toward the final score count by contributing to the obelisk (missing in the photo for kilroy_locke). The game moves quickly, and, while there’s   too much space in the box, I’d recommend playing a copy.

And now I have to ask what it means to “play a copy.” As it applies to film or recorded music, the meaning of “play a copy” is clear, and we can talk about scenes and acts, DVD extras, the various movements of a sonata or other composition. But with a game, the conditions and experience vary even more widely than audience experience in reader-response theory. You have the same framework—you engage with this thing before you—but a game demands a kind of embedded agency that the other genres lack. You can’t choose Hamlet’s destiny or whether Han shot first or not. You consult the text. With games, the choice becomes yours.

And Dana’s been enduring all of these games and game discussion with stellar and sterling good humor. She’s had a lot of rough shocks, and games themselves bring up a lot of bad memories. I keep saying that games are a key component of human experience and expression, so if Dana’s experience of games has been poisoned, than a key constituent of her humanity has been skewed. The attention that we play to the gamespace on this project (and this blog)—attention we must pay—bears this out.

In the discussion of whether or not games are art, I keep thinking of Yehuda Berlinger’s extension of an idea that words give us a handle on the world. With the right signifier, we can get others to almost literally see what we mean. Games lack a word to signify the importance of game play to humanity, and we certainly lack the word(s) to describe a game that vaults to the level of what would be called art in other practices. Is Blue Moon City that kind of game? Maybe. I’m not sure. But I’d sure as hell sit down to it with any one I know.

I’m watching a butterfly explore the honeysuckle that’s just about ready to bloom outside our window, and the constantly inconstant fluttering reminds me of those last three paragraphs. But these are rough drafts. Very rough. So bear with me?

Plague!

I warn you now that this will not be pretty. Yes, we had decided on Notre Dame, and we sat down to Notre Dame, but building a medieval city is an exercise in deprivation and pain.

Oh, and rats.

OK, so the game might not be as dark as all that, but this Stefan Feld design (and photos by Kilroy_locke) is hell in cardboard. It’s a game that doesn’t give up its secrets easily. Earlier this week, when we played Fresco, the strategies that you might want to pursue were clear, or at least were suggested by the design of the game. It was like looking under the hood of a car built before, say, 1990. After a moment’s   reflection, you can start to see where the various hoses connect, how the metal meshes, and you can get a sense for why the wires go where they do. Even Tikal, our last game, was pretty clear. You knew what you needed to do, and you knew goddam good and well that you couldn’t do it all.

Notre Dame? I’ll just mention this strange detail: the game comes with a hairshirt for each player.

Sorry. That’s not true. But the rules suggest that you should power-sand the first two layers of your skin off and then sprinkle each other with vinegar. 

OK, that’s not true, either, but it is true that this is not a game for the faint of heart. I did a little reading online, and it seems that a couple of players are feeling pretty good about their strategy after 150 or 500 plays. That’s a lot of deprivation and pain. And rats.

So let me explain a bit about how the game works. The board is modular, and it changes with the number of players. You each have a district for which you are responsible. Each district has the same buildings, hidden messages, and rat tracks. You will all get nine turns broken down into a few phases (one of the joys of this hobby is figuring out what each designer and publisher means by ‘phase’ and ‘turn’). You have a personal deck of building cards from which you draw three randomly. You keep one, pass two, receive two, choose one, and then you’ll get to play two of the three you end up with. The buildings give you things (points, money, resources, rat extermination, a chance to pick up messages) and you hope for the best. When you’re done with the buildings, you get a chance to bribe a local official or personality who also gives you advantages. The player with the most prestige points at the end wins.

 Oh, it should be that simple. This game is stingy in the way that salt is stingy to slugs. In a game like Airships, there are economic engines that you can count on. If you have this card, you will always get this resource. An engine like that has a certain inevitability, true, but a kind of elegance as well. But you must remind yourself as you play Notre Dame that we’re talking about an era when life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”…if you were lucky.

I’ll be honest, I wanted to cry. After a couple of rounds, I needed something, anything. Any goddam resource beyond simply keeping the rats out of my borough (though I kept wanting to say “arondissement”). At the end, after Dana won, we had split responses. I wanted to go back to it. How could I improve? Where had I gone wrong? at the beginning or in some detail? Dana decided it was a mean game, and was glad to be shut of it. It was not comfortable, and both reactions make a ton of sense.

Where does that leave us? I’m bemused that this game is part of a series from Alea called the Big Box Series. The Tikal box was large if you consider the acreage devoted to that face, but it wasn’t deep. Notre Dame is, well, modest. About the size of an old 3M box, or maybe a bit smaller. In the States, you’d have to have a box on the scale of Horus Heresy or Axis & Allies to be considered big. Or, hell, call yourself Titan and have done with it. But I do think about the resources that go into these games, even if the print runs are as tightly constrained as my rat population along the Rue des Chats. I try to buy games second hand (remind me to rant about the shipping practices of people who are not me) and not just for price. I’m trying to be a bit more discriminating as a consumer, and that ambition got easier as my literacy improved. I might suggest that an electronic format like the iPad or Surface might ease our drain on resources, but I’m leery of that claim; building those objects is hideously intensive. And the game experience is vastly different. I have yet to score well on the iPad version of Carcassonne, but the tabletop version is quite comfortable. Smaller boxes? Cheapass? Multi-use systems like PiecePack and Treehouse offer some intriguing options, though I admit that I haven’t played with either of the sets that I own. Cards are good, but the fun bits… Take a moment while I stroke the felt. Ah…

So there’s a lot in that last paragraph. Resources. The future and electronics. The social aspect of gaming. The tactile pleasure of manipulating the environment. So these are all issues to get back to. But Wendy will probably be chirping in a very few hours, and I need to go prepare for that.

Masking Aggression: Tikal

A logjam has broken, dear people. We planned on Tikal, we played Tikal, and Dana came back from trailing by four points to win by eight in the last scoring round of Tikal. The plan—deciding the night before what we’ll set down to the next evening—is a preliminary success. We’re looking at Notre Dame for tomorrow.

As the week wears on, we wear down, so I’m expecting this to be a short post. So I’ll get to the part where I describe the game:

Tikal won the SdJ in 1999, and it’s the first in what’s referred to as the “Mask Trilogy” because Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling went on to design two more games featuring giant masks on their boxes: Java, and Mexica (mask photo by yzemaze). Neither of which I own, though I have dreams in which the three lurid boxes expand to fill the horizon in every direction, taunting me with their strange words for flax, metal flake, and meta-narrative. These are the nights when I should have avoided the extra shake of hot sauce at dinner.

The Carolina blue felt (you may take a moment to consider whether god himself is a Tarheel waiting for basketball season) wasn’t quite large enough for Tikal. This is a big game. You can bury any number of large and inappropriate things in this box. But the production values are wonderfully high. Ravensburger and Rio Grande do nice graphic work and pay attention to detail. As we were putting the game away, Dana said, “This must’ve been a bitch to develop and playtest.” She said this because all the parts synch up so very nicely. As you run out of the tiles that let you uncover temples, temple tiles with higher values start to show up.

But let’s back up a bit. When the game starts (photo here by duchamp), you’re staring at a grid of hexes. On your turn, you select and place a large hex tile. And then you get ten points of action. Different actions cost different points, with the least expensive options clustering around movement and uncovering treasure or temples. The game moves quickly, perhaps most especially with two people, and we both had a wild look in our eyes when we talked about what would happen if you added more players. And we were intrigued because there’s a bit of area-control, but that control is only important in scoring rounds. 

If you can track Tikal down, snatch it up.

I want to add that I found this game in a combination game shop/used bookstore/aquarium supply store in Brookings, South Dakota on a weekend trip to visit friends who had been part of the gaming group we stumbled onto when we moved to Lincoln and changed the trajectory of our interests. And lord did we play some games that weekend.

Another topic to consider is how these game designs encourage an engagement with the rules and other players that seems more like puzzle-solving. While Tikal led us into tactical engagements, there were clear strategies that emerged, from the placing of tiles, to the development of temples, to the search for treasure. We both tried to maximize our positions for scoring when scoring happened, and we both jockeyed for position for end-game scoring. We were in position to block each other—and did—but the way scoring works (each of you gets a free ten action points to better your position before you score) forces each player to give up something from which the other player(s) will benefit. The design of the game blunt the edge of pure aggression. You can’t sweep in like you would in Risk, and there’s enough of a touch of randomness that you can’t plan exactly what you’ll do, though the size and option of the tiles mitigates against wild shifts in board positioning (and there’s an auction variant with the game that further erodes the randomness).

I mention the puzzle aspect because I stopped playing games in my late teens because I behaved badly around them (a good podcast about losing games is over at Pulp Gamer, nb). I got very intense and was quite willing to cheat to win. I found this behavior troubling, and with good reason. I just didn’t like myself when I played. Later, in my early twenties, I blundered into a group of martial arts practitioners and got drawn in. Over the years of hearing “invest in loss” and “eat bitter,” I learned to find the importance of losing and the skills that accumulate over years of hard practice. So when I came back to boardgames in my thirties, I was intrigued. It helps, of course, that boardgames had matured as well.

One last topic to throw out as a teaser: how do you respond to a theme of Central American exploration? There’s a bit of the Indiana Jones thrill, of course, but I keep having these creeping feelings of creepiness imagining that I’m sending a bunch of white guys to machete lianas off Aztec and Mayan temples while loading up on the wealth of a vanquished civilization. Talk amongst yourselves. This post got way out of hand, and it’s time for bed.