Forest of Games

What's at Stake?

The river of snot is starting to dry up. More like a summertime creek of snot with random freshets brought on by dust. So Wendy went to bed early—happily!—and the only thing we can hear over the monitor is her fan. 

We’ve reached a sort of meta-analysis-paralysis. AP—as the geeks refer to the general condition of analysis-paralysis—is the state some players get to when they look at a board, a hand of cards, a tile, and then freeze as they play out, in the manner of Deep Blue, all of their choices and the attendant consequences. We all suffer from this from time to time. Just the other night, Marianne got hung up in AP as she pondered a version of the Monty Hall problem: Do I flip a tile and give Dave the choice of trucks? Do I take the truck with two and leave him some of the animals he needs? Or the new tile might give him more…? Dave and I played along, so the moment went well, and this freeze-up happened at the very end of the game, so it felt appropriate.

Tonight… Ah. I keep wanting to give Dana her choice of game. This hobby is not her default activity, and I want to give her the opportunity to pick a game that seems interesting to her. But I know the games we have better. There’s a tendency to pick a small box, looking for time and energy constraints, though I know that some of the largest boxes we own (hello, Stratego! nice box, Color Dwarf [the name of which sounds better in German: Farbenzwerge]) are our least interesting games. The situation, to recall a film line, comes from a failure to communicate.

So we ended up with the tiny abstract game Ponte del Diavolo (box photo from Sentieiro). You play either pale or dark pieces onto the interstices of a grid—like a chess or checkers board, but I can’t resist the word “interstices.” Such a sexy word. Like a woman at a party wearing a little black dress, holding a sweating glass of white wine, and looking at you with a raised eyebrow. Like that. Turns out that you have some sort of stain on your shirt that looks like her home state (you’re hoping Rhode Island but fear Alaska). In Ponte del Diavolo—remember?—you want to develop “islands” of exactly four pieces no less than one space away from from other groups of four that you can then link with the titular bridges. The longer the connected string of islands, the more points you score. About halfway through, Dana announced that she was losing spectacularly. She was only wrong on the adverb.

The experience of the Devil’s Bridge left us out of sorts, so Dana called out a name that I’d been hoping to revisit, Druidenwalzer (a game I picked up because of an episode of The Spiel). This little Kosmos two-player game has an odd grip on my imagination, perhaps because of the art or the fairy dance and druid’s battle that comprise the main action of the game. The difficult part is to see how the dance, which can shift several cards, will affect the combat, which can involve several more cards. As I went through the rules and started to feel comfortable, even going so far as to play the first dance, Dana sort of shut down.

“I can’t do this.”

“What?”

“When they have those questions on standardized tests that ask you to flip the image in your head and pick that image out of the group below? Yeah, I always missed all of them.”

So, we packed up Druidenwalzer.

After the game was put away, we talked about the cultural weight and baggage of games, particularly as those issues play out in families and gender. Because Dana has no trouble knitting any damn thing you want. She can take a pattern that has nothing to do with her final vision and adopt it—shifting stitch counts, adding or removing appendages, changing orientation. She’s a genius at crafts as well as fabric arts. And this is before we get to her scholarly work: she’s a subtle and accomplished thinker. So, something happens when we sit down to play games, something that works on an emotional level that short-circuits her otherwise marvelous brain. Perhaps it’s a question of what’s at stake; certainly, that would play into issues around high-stakes testing. We talked about a lot of stuff, and I’ll leave off with these hints and suggestions. The issues of family and gender are rich for all of us, and well worth delving into.

The issue for the project, though, is how to get around the AP. So we’re going to try a new practice: we choose a game the night before and let me try to work on the rules before we sit down to it. I pulled out a small group for us to look at, and I think we’ll be in a better position for when it’s our turn to pick whether or not to send the pandas to Dave. 

Game Literacy: Beyond "How Do You Play This?"

There exists the distinct possibility that Wendy is a stealth illness vector. Dana is feeling run down and a bit spacey. Last night, she was knitting a doll for the girl—a doll complete with bellybutton, an extra that will no doubt send the child into a round of poking everyone in the bellybutton and exclaiming, “Beybuh!” This will force us to hike up our shirts to croptop level, making us feel self-consciously like we’re re-living certain moments of junior high before we were sent home for shirts with better “coverage.” A moment that made us reflect, as teens, on the ways that news and clothing overlap.

But we were also waiting for Marianne and Dave to arrive for some gaming. I’ve been brushing up on the rules for Zooloretto, the 2007 SdJ winner (photos by MikeHulsebus). The first time we played this game, in 2007, I believe, I was still new to Eurogames and their rules. We were hosting a game night with a group of friends that was splintering, and that particular night was punctuated by the cries of a toddler for which we were woefully ill-prepared. Or simply woefully prepared. Our ill-preparation has been reversed by now, as you might have suspected if you’ve been reading along as these adventures have unreeled. So. I was rattled as a game instructor, and the rules seemed tricky and complicated. Three years later, not so much.

Dana might be struggling to defeat Wendy’s cold and knitting with great skill, but what I haven’t revealed about her is that she’s a powerlifter. Which isn’t true, so we’ll continue. In fact, she’s a literacy scholar, a sort of intellectual powerlifter given that she’s working on an advanced degree. Years ago, when both of us were teaching—she continues that practice while I have retreated to office work—we assigned literacy narrative essays. And, again, she has continued the practice. The assignment, and the whole of literacy studies, turns on a larger definition of literacy than most people outside the academy use. Literacy is widely understood to be a way to talk about the skills needed to work successfully inside the various kinds of conversations taking place within a field or community. These skills, or their lack, is what marks you as you go to the bank for a loan or the repair shop for your car. There are ways to fake literacy and ways for the community to suss you out.

In the middle of this thinking, Dana said that she heard someone at the door. No one was at the front door, but then in the midst of our pause we heard someone pounding on the back door. So off we scampered. Marianne and Dave had biked through the heat and parked their rides behind our small shed.

Zooloretto and a couple bowls of snacks (a nut-and-raisin mix and some Japanese rice crunchies) were waiting. Dana kept knitting as we developed our zoos. It’s a cute, fun game with some definite thinking involved. The loading up of trucks, the taking and dispersal of trucks, and the shifting of animals around the zoo goes pretty quickly, especially with only three people. Marianne was the clear winner, Dave and I were neck and neck for second and third.

We had a bit of time, so I suggested that we go through a game of Castle Panic. They had never played a cooperative game, and CP goes very quickly. The key to co-op games, mechanically, is how the bad stuff comes at you. In CP, the bad stuff comes from a bag of monsters—angry cartoon monsters. Poor Marianne felt the anxiety of the monsters coming toward pretty keenly, which is a good way to judge the effectiveness of a co-op game’s design. And, of course, her anxiety was well-founded: we lost. Damn the trolls!

Afterward, we talked about gaming literacy. How that concept applies to familiarity with rules (in fact, when I first played Zooloretto, I had a hard time figuring out how the game worked), with game mechanisms, and with the kinds of conversation that take place around games. Dave mentioned trying to figure out how to play Mexican Train Dominoes with his family, all of whom are highly educated (there may have been an issue with the slippages that can disjoint translated rules, there, he suggested, but still). It’s clear to me, though, that I have become a better reader and interpreter (in a different sense than moving from one language to another) of rules. I can read them more quickly and accurately, and I can identify trouble spots that are actual trouble spots and not simply complex moments in the game’s design. During this month, I’ve also worked on my teaching skills, because teaching a game is very different from teaching people how to write. In the latter, you’re teaching expanded—and ever-expanding—concepts of literacy and practice. With a game, you’re teaching a very discrete set of practices that are somewhat arbitrary.

I could go on and on, and probably will at some other place and time, but I wanted to return briefly to the literacy narrative. Frequently, the assignment asks for a student to reflect on how a particular event or practice has influenced their reading and writing. For a broader assignment, you might ask how a particular even or practice has influenced your participation in a community and that community’s conversations. Why did you decide to participate more? Did the conversations deepen? When? How? Let’s say…games. What conversations are taking place? Among which people? Where? Are you still playing games? More interesting games?

Not an assignment I can assign anywhere but here. If you like, you can add yours to the comments. Or send them to me by whatever means are at your disposal. I will award experience points.

The Pain in Paint

Wendy’s still working on exorcising the last of a summertime child’s cold, so the house was a mucusy mess when Shelly and Bryan brought a short stack of games over: Owner’s Choice, Wasabi, Thunderstone, and Fresco. The last of which was on the SdJ short list, so that qualification plus the discussion of Eurogame design as a sort of art period, plus (a double bonus! score!) the theme of fresco painting in the Renaissance sold us on that game.

Dana bravely volunteered to settle the girl while I talked through the initial set-up with our guests. One drawback to the game is that it doesn’t play a two-player version easily. The designers have built the awkward work-around of having a dummy third player at the table. Bryan and Shelly, who played the game two-player last weekend, described the third player role as a kind of art assassin that they sent to undermine the other’s choices.

The game itself is beautiful, as you would hope for a game about art (photo by Gangster1930). And there’s a bit of whimsy in the various activities that go on. My particular favorite is that turn order is initially determined by the player in last place who gets the option to choose when his workers will rise and go to the market. The player next up on the score chart chooses her workers’ time to rise and so on. The early workers get the widest choice, but they have to pay the most money, and you, the master-painter, have to deal with their increasing sulkiness. Really. There’s a mood track. If they get too cranky, they quit on you (though they are easy to recover). If you send them to the theater enough (that and a later rising time will improve their mood), then they’ll bring along a friend who’ll pitch in at the atelier.

The game is solid. Your choices have consequence, and your workshop zooms along. I came in a woeful last place, having invested too quickly in some short gains (I may also have forgotten to pick up cash on a round or two, but what the hell) and not mixing my paints early and often. I’m already thinking about how to play it better a second time.

Dana played extremely well. Beat me by a good twenty points. Shelly and Bryan zipped well beyond us pretty early on, so the experience was pretty solidly in the “learning game” category.

I have two topics that suggest themselves out of this evening. One comes from a conversation with a colleague earlier in the day: more on technology and games. The simple fact that this game is printed on a lovely board with lots of solid cardboard pieces and wooden cubes is one thing, but the math (do you sense a theme?) that had to have been developed is a more subtle but powerful structure to the gamespace. Another, and one that’s only been touched on obliquely, is how to experience a game when you’re getting your head handed to you. I’ve been arguing that games are about many things, and only about winning at one, very surface, level. Victory is the MacGuffin. Dana and I both enjoyed the game for the theme, how the theme was realized in play, and the time spent with friends.

So how is it that I write my way to the questions worth wrestling with at the end of the post? And here I am, exhausted by work. And so much more to consider, to describe… The pale blue felt will be there tomorrow. And we’ll put the sticky runners under it again because we’ll have guests. See? You can come over. Unless you’re in New England. In which case, I insist you stay there. Good luck with the bears!

Fairy Tale Narrative

Dana and I have been playing games I’ve described here as Eurogames, designer games, or hobby games. Some people refer to them as “these games of ours,” but I tend to favor the Eurogames tag. It’s a complicated reason—and complication is good—but I’ve felt my favoring if the term reviving after re-reading a post by Yehuda Berlinger arguing for considering game design forming periods in much the same way that art or literature can be grouped or separated into periods. Eurogame design favors non-confrontational interaction, a minimization of randomness, favors algorithms over theme, strives to engage all players on every turn, and keeps all players in the game until the end. There are exceptions to this list, of course, but the essentials are there.

Last night we sat down to Fairy Tale (yes, Kilroy_Locke with the photo), which we had considered and rejected the day before . Unlike many games of the Eurogame family, Fairy Tale comes from a Japanese designer, Satoshi Nakamura. The game is a bit like Magic: The Gathering lite, and all in one box. You start with a large deck of cards, and the players draft them into their hands with a mechanism that has reached its maturity with Dominion and Thunderstone. As you play cards down in each round, you develop relationships among the cards that determine your score. Cards move quickly, especially in a two-player game, and it becomes clear early on what you’ll be able to do. Dana and I played two hands in forty minutes. I won both times, but the margin of victory shrunk from nine to four. Still, she didn’t care for the game, so we talked about what turned her off.

Not the art, but the lack of developed and clear narrative. Games like Carcassonne and Ingenious leave a visual narrative of the play. Jambo had an ad hoc narrative of trade and community. Fairy Tale has a story, but it’s not well developed in the flavor text (the brief paragraph or two telling you how what you’re simulating), and the story’s hard to make up on your own as you’re passing and playing cards. Such a story can develop, but Dana (and I) spent so much time thinking about the math of the final relationships that the joy of narrative all but disappeared. (Remind us to talk about resource management and Dana's increasing interest in games that have that mechanism.)

So we’re left with two issues: narrative and abstraction. Both of these are too large to deal with so close to bedtime. But I want to point out that these are huge issues for how humans deal with the world, and it’s important to recognize that games deal with each explicitly. Games force us—as designers, as players, as scholars—to engage deeply with these issues. While a party game like Trivial Pursuit might skew heavily toward the ludus end and not really pick up the question of abstraction, the game clearly builds a narrative that we can revisit and share—a narrative developed during play and which we share during the gameplay experience.

Boardgames Are My Bag

We were thinking of something quick. Something… with a bit of think to it. So we looked over the likely candidates, passed over Fairy Tale, and pulled Ingenious off the shelf. Way off the shelf. We have it at the top of a set of bookshelves, the top of which is dedicated to games in square boxes. I assume that we’re among friends so that this confession won’t go too far. I trust you, you know. (I would have taken you to the prom…you know that, right?) Many stacks of square boxes rise above the bookcase and add a bit of color the the beige walls. They look good, but you have to stand on a chair to pull one off.

So, Ingenious.  

It’s a clever game (photo by Kilroy_Locke, again), another in the Reiner Knizia oeuvre (he of the “the goal of the game is to win, but it’s the goal that’s important, not the winning” quote) and his math background is clear. Ingenious fits well among a few of his other games, Lost Cities (photo: AngusBull) and Keltis (photo JudgeLP) especially. In all of these games, the mechanics force you to score evenly across all your pieces (and I think that Lost Cities and Keltis began life as the same game). In Ingenious you have double-hex pieces—think dominoes shaped like hourglasses—with shapes in each hex. As in dominoes,   some of the pieces are doubles, but that doesn’t matter much to game play. With each play, at least one side of the piece must match an already-played piece. You score points for each hex with the matching pattern already on the board that lay in any line radiating out from the piece you played. But here’s the (cough) ingenious part: at the end of the game you only keep the lowest-scored pattern. If your lowest score is higher than anyone else’s lowest score   (regardless of which pattern), you win. So you’re always trying to score higher than the others’ lowest score, and you can’t neglect any category. The game moves quickly, and the board looks nice when it’s full—always a plus. We both liked the game, and Dana managed to break her losing streak on a tie-breaker—always a plus.

When I started to invest time and attention in this hobby, I discovered that there was a Do It Yourself  component if you wanted to pursue those practices. And I did. So I made tuckboxes (the little boxes that cards come in) for games with a lot of cards and separated the counters, meeples, etc. into little plastic baggies (speeds the set-up time) and I made a dice tray out of an old cigar box and green felt. A good many games require you to draw pieces out of a bowl or bag, but many of the bags that come with these games are translucent at best. Dana likes to work with fabric, and I showed her some of the bags that other people had made on BoardGameGeek (there’s at least one man who makes them, and he chastises men for ignoring the sewing machine as a power tool). It was a geeky kind of inspiration, and it sent us out to the fabric store for material.

The first bag she made was for Arkham Horror, so a lot of murky greens and blues. The next big draw bag she made has French peasants out in fields, so we use that one for Carcassonne. And she sewed up a few others of different sizes with a generic chess theme to them. She followed Diane Close’s tutorial (the bag pictured is one of Diane’s) and then applied the idea to ever larger projects. So our house has about twenty colorful bags filled with Wendy toys and flotsam (the varied bits of toys and toy pieces that have floated off and that you can simply scoop up off the surfaces of the house). Even now, Dana’s sitting at the machine sewing another bag. It seems to have cats, fish, and moons over it. Destined for toys. Or maybe a project bag.

Panic and the Wicked Witch

We’re thinking a lot about cooperative games today given the rough run that Dana’s had. 

But as so often happens, the rest of life interferes. I have a notion here to veer off into a discussion of the strange ways that business—and other employers—insist that your life, your real life, the life of health, family, and friendships, that your life must not interfere with your work. Rather, I think it’s better simply to call that work “job.” What’s my work? This essay project? The poetry? The difficult work of play? These are all a kind of work, but a work that fulfills me as a human being. You have your own work, whatever it might be: gardening, volunteering, woodwork. So many ways to work with your spirit, to be part of anything larger than you.

And sometimes the facets of your life collapse and refold like proteins and your tiny child—and your work for her is hard but rewarding—develops one of those childhood rhinitis issues and completely retwists your day. 

At several points it’s easy to resent a project like this. “You’re in a bad mood,” you snarl at your project partner. “No, I’m not,” she sulks. So both of you are, to use the appropriate cliche, feeling off your game. But game you must. “We were thinking about a cooperative game,” you suggest. 

“OK,” she says, “I’m game.”

I did some prep work for Castle Panic and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (the Front Porch Classic version).

But first, a quick digression (a recent podcast? sure!). The concept of the co-op game isn’t difficult—all the players work against the game—but it’s not a familiar concept. The games aren’t non-competitive, but the competition is against the game’s mechanisms. This approach separates co-op games from non-competitive games like the Ungame (a tedious “conversation starter” game with no beginning and no end, just a long, circular path and a box of questions). Games like Arkham Horror (an H.P. Lovecraft theme) and Pandemic (epidemiology!) unleash various nasty things (monsters and diseases, respectively) that the players must respond to. In other games, there can be a hidden agenda at work. In Battlestar Galactica and Shadows Over Camelot, a traitor works secretly to thwart the rest of the players. The games can run from the mind-blowingly complex—Arkham Horror (three large-box expansions and four more small boxes)—to the very quick—Pandemic.

And Castle Panic.  

The structure of Castle Panic (and a nod to garea37 for the photo) is simple: draw cards to your hand limit, trade a card or two with another player, play cards to wound or defeat monsters, move the monsters closer, draw two monsters. It’s a bit like the battle of Helms Deep. Orcs, trolls, and goblins ride out of the woods to try to crush the defenders. But you don’t get a Gandalf and the Ents card (an excellent name for a geek-rock band, I think).  If you’re allergic to fantasy critters, stay away from this game. But my god the thing played quickly. We only had the two of us playing, but it was a learning game, which usually adds to the time commitment. And though we tried to end Dana’s losing streak, this game didn’t do it, but we did lose together. Damn the Orc King! And that sneaky goblin that came through on our unprotected flank.

 Dana’s a big fan of two iconic literary heroines: Dorothy Gale and Alice. The Front Porch Classics version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is another co-op game with three levels of play. I had played the basic game with my brother and some of his kids over the Christmas holiday last year, but Dana and I wanted to try the standard version. Except… this is one of the world rulesets I’ve ever read. The rules are very pretty, lots of illustrations, and totally inadequate. The biggest sin is the neglect of small but important details. How to set up if you’re not playing with a full complement of four? Do you keep the “Special” deck separate? Can you re-use leader tokens, or do these need to stay out? Questions that had me flipping through the book, Dana firing questions, and both of us getting prickly. So the Wicked Witch won without us even playing a full turn. 

Oh, Glinda, we’ll try to make it up to you.  

Chocolate!

Yesterday we hit a local antique shop. A lot of old media tie-in games, but we were really looking for a carpenter’s box to store Wendy supplies.

I’ve been mulling over a conversation I had with a friend of mine years ago. He hates boardgames. They make him want to run away screaming, he says, when anyone mentions them. He says he just wants to make stuff up on his own. As do I, but I don’t mind the more constrained structures of play and creativity. In doing research for this blog and project, I ran across an interesting post on Old Is the New New suggesting a spectrum of play. At one end, ludus, at the other, paidia. Boardgames tend toward the ludus end of the spectrum—especially the eurogames/designer games we tend to favor—but we have some games that move toward paidia. Once Upon a Time comes to mind. I’m still considering our various engagements with this spectrum of play—at least when it comes to games.

Last night Dana and I sat down to an actual Cheapass Game. Dana had it in her mind to play one of the white envelope games after our play with the re-released Titanic games box of Kill Doctor Lucky. Her sweet tooth was pinging, so we pulled Enemy Chocolatier out and assembled the pieces (picture by BGG user Dannysland). The schtick for Cheapass Games is that they provide you with the very least bit of stuff you need for a game.   A couple of sheets for a board. Maybe some speciality cards for you to slice up and shuffle. And a rule book. You might needs pawns, tokens, money, dice, playing cards…but these things should be stuff you have in other games or just floating around the house. Their concept is interesting, and it lets them put out a lot of material. And it suggests a certain kind of environmental friendliness, though that’s not really on their agenda, at least not in the way that it is for Blue Orange Games.

But we’re talking about Enemy Chocolatier. It’s a pretty good little game with a fun theme that’s a bit awkwardly pasted onto the rules. You pay money  to buy parts of neighborhoods that double as resources for a candy factory. As you control neighborhoods, you get money and victory points that move you toward buying more resources and winning the game. No randomness, a bit of area control/area enclosure, and an economic engine. You can play it cutthroat by thwarting obvious attempts to take over neighborhoods, but the game plays pretty tamely with two. Nevertheless, I won easily. And again, this did not leave Dana feeling real good about the experience.

So what to do? We dissected the game a bit, noting where an early check on my expansionist tendencies would have helped her. We talked about how the game had some good structures that kept me from stomping entirely when she saw that her cause was lost. In this game, we couldn’t blame dice or cards. There was a moment early on when her face brightened and then darkened as she realized what I was doing and why, and she immediately could project the implications of that moment into the future. It’s not an easy discussion to have with your spouse/partner, this talk about strategy and insight. Because the talk goes to places about choices they make, and it’s a strong temptation to use that to point to other choices they might make—or have made—away from the gaming table.

So we’re thinking about cooperative games tonight.  

So Random

I decided to give myself a long weekend after a very long haul of craziness at work. I’m mostly in charge of my own self at work, so I have no malevolent boss to blame. Except me. It’s true, I am my own Gargamel. 

After another visit by our DSL provider to reconnect our tubes to the internet (a new wall jack, new wiring to the house, new wire from jack to modem), we were ready for some gaming.

Dana and I were looking for something quick, something fairly light, but that had a nice collection of bits. I was feeling in a mood to have pieces to manipulate. I brought out a stack of games: Airships, Can’t Stop!, Ingenious, and Kachina. Dana picked a return to a game I got stomped at the last time we played: Airships. She insists on playing the French, so I picked the Germans. No one gets any advantages, but you do get themed bits to move about. The theme of Airships (ne Giganten der Lufte) is the building of, well, you know, don’t you? Dirigibles. Zeppelins. Eventually, you want to get in on the building of the Hindenburg, and it’s the completion of that airship that ends the game. But what you’re doing is building little dice engines. You win cards, and victory points, eventually, by assembling a factory. The different parts of the factory allow you to use—or transform—dice.   Roll for upgrades, for zeppelins, for construction on the most explosive of blimps. There’s a mechanism that gives you extra, virtual pips if you  lose a roll. And poor Dana lost a lot of them. Some key rolls. At very inopportune times(Dana at one point even kissed her dice and asked them for a new pair of shoes). I didn’t feel superior for having the dice break well for me, though Dana was losing interest. So I pushed the game ending even though I wanted to explore a bit more engine-building. This is another game of tactics, though with mediating mechanics. Still, mediating was not enough to balance a two-player game.

I’ve written about cards driving the randomness in a game, and here we have dice. But notice that I didn’t feel like I was playing essentially a better game than Dana. She played well. At one point, she had a much better balanced factory than I did. Hell, I think she ended the game with a better board. My win seems almost inexplicable. For most of the game, though, we were both having a good time, even when I kept rolling freakishly well. Staying happy and engaged—winning or losing—requires a cooperation between the players. A recent podcast round table discussed the social contract of gaming, and that contract is key to the enjoyment Dana and I have when playing across the table, sky blue under our elbows. 

Technology and Board Games

Tuesday’s child is full of… whatever the hell Tuesday’s child is supposed to be full of full of. Or maybe it’s round of face. Likes Ace of Bass? Meh. Tuesday’s games were full of fantasy. I realize that the sentence doesn’t rhyme like the traditional verse, but at least I can remember it.

We started with Fredericus, a small box game from DaVinci/Mayfair that Dana bought me from the deep discount shelf at Hobbytown USA. The game seemed to perplex her a bit, and it’s not the most readily available theme or ruleset. I would describe it as one of those games where the algorithm is hiding just below the cards and play. In Fredericus (the picture is from RPG.net), you play a falconer with a goshawk and a peregrine. You move to “towers” set on each side of an eight-sided figure and send your bird out to hunt entirely fantastical creatures (in other words, made up entirely for the game). Spreading out from each side is the countryside (forest and air cards), the wild creatures (more cards), and places to curry the king’s favor (king Fredericus represented by more cards). On a turn, you move your falcons, shift the cards, try for a hunt, hood your enemies birds, or gain favor. A separate deck of goal cards counts down the game, which ends when Fred himself is revealed at the bottom of the stack. And there's a bit of betting going on, too. Solid little game. Very few rules, easy to grasp, but the interaction of the players through the constant shifting of cards makes for tight tactical play. Which left Dana scowling the whole time.

So we moved to a familiar kid’s game as a palate-cleanser: The aMAZEing Labyrinth. It’s a maze game with a gimmick: the board moves with each turn (another tip of the hat to Kilroy_locke). A central grid of corridors is glued to the board, but the rest of the board comprises chunky tiles that get pushed around with each player. You have a goal card (a series of them, but no entirely one-off creatures) representing one of the bits of loot illustrated on the board. You move a row or column and then move  your pawn as far as it can go. If you land on your loot, you flip your card over, draw a new one (no, keep it secret), and play passes. Cute art. Great bits. Readily available, and it beats the everloving life out of Sorry! Just to name one tedious American classic.

We’ve been having an assortment of slightly annoying trouble with our electronics. The slightly sour RAM. The first incident with the DSL (really? seven thirty on a Sunday morning?). And now the Second Incident with the DSL (Wow. You’ve had 100 dropouts in fourteen days. That’s not right.—No doubt.). But the boardgames go on. Why not? At worst, we have candles, a lowly technology. But just high tech enough to let us keep playing.

There's more to say on this topic--the iPad, the MS Surface--but we'll come back to those issues, as well as issues about, say, the kind of industrial production that allows for all these different boardgames. That topic brings up some environmental impact questions, too, but all in good time.

Timing

Here's an answer to a question no one has asked: we're usually sitting down to games between 7 and 9. Just saying.