Forest of Games

Death, Games, and Theme

Last night, we did our dastardly best in trying to Kill Doctor Lucky. Since one of us has a PhD and one of the cats is named Lucky, it was a good night. Perhaps especially because I did the codger in twice.

We had two three-person rounds of the classic Cheapass Game (though the version we have is the nicely mounted board from Titanic Games)(and thanks to Kilroy_Locke for the photos again). The game inhabits, roughly, the time frame before Clue. You’re all the mansion when the lights go out. And then you have to creep around and try to kill Dr. Lucky. What separates the game from Clue as a design is the control that each player has. You can always move one, you can always draw a card (that might allow for more movement, better weapons, or ways to thwart your opponent’s murderous intentions). Spite tokens add an economic element that drives the game fairly quickly—if not inevitably—to its conclusion.

Kim came over to play with us again, and we had an entertaining evening looking for good combinations of rooms and weapons (the crepe pan is far more deadly in the kitchen, as you might intuit). She’s courting with a gent from Hastings, so we got to do a little gossiping.

But I want to go back a couple of days.

Dana and Kim both liked Carcassonne better than Dicke Damonen because of the chrome, the theme and structure of the former made gameplay appear more intuitive. You line up the roads, you add to cities, and don’t open the unwalled parts of the city onto the green space. You put your meeple down or you don’t. The latter game, Dicke Damonen, is far more abstract. The cords represent earth, air, fire, and water, but they could really be anything. The pawn colors correspond, but the correspondence could be random. While both games have push-your-luck elements (down to one meeple…should I place it? or when do I want to declare that I think green will score highest?) and subtle area control mechanics, Carcassonne flowed more easily in play. It made more intuitive sense as a space and experience. We can talk about how theme does or doesn’t make a game better (which of these is the “better” game? what does that mean?), but it seems pretty clear that for the casual gamer at least, theme enhances and deepens the ruleset.

And they liked Carcassonne better because you could control your own color from the beginning. That whole “every color belongs to everyone” is a little tricky. Particularly when you’re scrambling for space and points.

Is there "theme" to Dr. Lucky? After a fashion. It feels like the game started as a concept "it's the moment before the Clue game begins--with funny stuff" and then had rules developed to fit. And it works. But this situation is one where the idea of how theme helps mechanics might not apply.

Play, It Does a Body Good

After the trip(s) to Omaha, Wendy at the Kid’s Museum, and so on, Dana was tired and grumpy at home. So… not wanting to play a goddam game. We settled on Fluxx, easily the most stripped-down of any game in the collection, and then one of the very few dexterity games we own, Elk Fest. After Fluxx, she felt better and participated happily in Elk Fest.

 

Games have consistently made us feel better after playing. Even after losing, even after thinking that we’re losing badly (and Carcassonne is so nicely designed that Dana was far, far behind and came within a  dozen points of winning in a 150 point game the other night). How is that? How can a little bit of competition, an engagement with an arbitrary ruleset help us get out of a funk? 

I don’t have time now to flesh that idea out, but I have some ideas, many of which have to do with what it means to be human, to act as humans, and how games—one of our great inventions—help us to experience playful aspects of ourselves.

 

And, of course, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

Bonus: I was talking to one of my colleagues—and a game-day attendee—about the blanket invitation to come play. Please, drop us a line. You won’t be inviting yourselves over; we’re asking. For, you know, the next three weeks. 

Social Engagement

I wrote the notes for the 17th in the courtyard among the alleys and slow streets of Village Pointe—an outdoor mall—in Omaha. Why? Because that upscale, outdoor shopping center (see also: J.Jill, White House Black Market, Harry & David, Ann Taylor, J. Crew, etc.) has a Mac store. And Mac stores have the Genius Bar, and I needed the Geniuses because my laptop started sending Morse code to me this morning.

Seriously.

If you try to start the machine when it’s ditching, it beeps the SOS to you. When you tell the Genius that your machine beeped this extraordinary sequence to you, they want to reproduce it, but they’re already looking to the back of house where the repair parts are stashed, as the friendly, dyed-blond woman who helped me did.

And, of course, I’ve had Abba in my head all day thanks to my machine.

Turns out that the RAM had gone sour. There’s a theme about spoilage that I’m unwilling to engage.

So what about games on the 17th?

I’m so glad you asked. It’s why I love you and look forward to your visits.

Dana and I were invited to Ladette Randolph and her husband Noel’s farewell party out in the local, rural recesses of Nebraska. We had engaged a high school babysitter who had to cancel on us, so we imposed on our neighbor, Kim, to put Wendy to bed as we set out into the hot night. After half an hour of highway driving, we dove onto a gravel road that took us through tall corn taut with well-developed ears, more grain than the world’s raccoons and deer could eat in a lifetime. So I’m happy to report that your supply of high fructose syrup is secure.

We knew about six people there—out of about forty—so we sat on the front porch on a metal table and chairs set and listened to meadowlarks, mourning doves, crickets, cicadas, and the scratching of bluestem and ash trees. Ladette and Noel care for twenty acres of fields, trees, outbuildings, and some very close xeriscaping. 

We stayed about and hour and then took dirt roads back to town. 

Kim said that Wendy went to bed easily, and we chatted for a short time. Kim gathered her water bottle and book and was about to leave when we asked if she’d like to stay for a game. Dana mentioned the project, and that was enough for Kim to feel that she wasn’t imposing on us if she joined us. So we cleared the table, spread out the felt, and I dug out one of the two print-and-play games that I’ve assembled: Dicke Damonen (photo from Bruno Faidutti's ideal game library).  It’s a fairly abstract game about demons taking over parts of the world. It involves four colors of string, four matching colors of pawn, and a set of ghosts. It’s quick, it might well be fun, and we had a grand time trying it out.

Dana then wanted to move on to Carcassonne (photo by AngusBull), one of the very first games in our collection. My collection? It’s hard to keep the possessives straight. I cannot recommend the game highly enough, and I’ll move through the story quickly by noting that Kim won.

As I was siting in Omaha thinking about how I could conspire to sit so that the wind would help me keep my hair out of my eyes, I thought about how Dana and I would get a game in on Sunday, given our disrupted schedule. The project, I thought, was important and we needed to keep this thing going. I thought about ego, about my need to do this, but it occurred to me almost simultaneously that what I really needed to schedule was social time with my wife, that what this project had forced me to do was find ways to spend social time with Dana—and any other people who wanted to be a part of this. The change for me, though, is that focus, that purposeful setting aside of time to be with Dana, with family, with community. And that change seems good. 

Born of Flame

The storm from two nights ago has knocked out the DSL so I can’t update the blog, check email, check the weather report, so we wait for the radio as if we’re time travelers getting translated way back to, oh, 1990. The electricity is still going strong, though, and we need to juice to power fans and air conditioning, the latter we keep set around eighty. We keep it warm mostly because we hate the transition from ninety-five to seventy that businesses apparently favor and that gives Dana and me head colds. Plus, it’s nice when your shorts and tank are just as comfortable inside as out. 

Wendy went to bed early. She refused to nap and was riding a nerve-wracking freakout as the afternoon wore on. Her frenetic day also wore out Dana, so we decided that a short, small game would be the best choice for us. We settled on Phoenix. (Photo from BaSL on BGG) 

 

We mixed up some glasses of rum and coke, unfolded the blue felt, and set up this small, lovely abstract game. I think it’s our first pure abstract since Mancala, and, like any good abstract, the rules are simple. Hefty cubes representing most of Roy G. Biv are arranged randomly in the center of the board.  Each player pulls ten pawns (there are five of each of the six colors of the spectrum) and sets them up in draw order on their side of the board. The players also get five cards from a shared deck. The cards dictate the action: swap pieces, move them up, swap the center cubes, etc. With the cards, the players move their pawns to align with the central cubes. It’s a quick game, a bit random with the pawn-pull and cards, but it offers some interesting challenges. 

But what’s really interesting is why we have this game. This past Christmas, 2009, Dana, Wendy, and I were treated to a mysterious, overwhelming generosity. A local Secret Santa dropped off baskets, bags, and piles of gifts. Whoever it was left a note explaining their project that left us both in tears. Among the gifts was this game. And I appreciate that this person spent the time to find a good game. 

So, thank you. 

And now Saturday looks a little busy. We’ll have to work hard to find time for a game.

Ah, and if you’re in Lincoln and you’d like to be part of this project, leave your email in the comments (be sure to spell out “at” and “dot” to foil bots).

Beep Beep

Tonight the temperatures leveled out after the storms, so we threw open the windows and sat down at the dining room table for a Michael Schacht game, Paris Paris. You can end that double “iss iss” or “ee ee.” Since Dana studied abroad in Paris, and I majored in French, we tend toward the “ee ee” version. And not calling it the “Center Pompidow.” Schacht talks about this game being a rough draft of Hansa, a much heavier game. 

I thought it might be good to set the scene a little bit for you. We have a heavy dining room table of pale wood with painted white legs. We’ve set it deep into one end of the rectangular room—both rectangles are oriented the same direction—so that there’s space for a Wendy play area. After dinner, and after Wendy’s in bed, we sponge off one half of the table and lay out a piece of light blue, acrylic felt. For game days, I lay down a bit of clingy runner and unfold the felt over the whole table. For these nights, I leave the felt folded and we play on the smaller area. We have two three large bookcases around us, with one of the bookcases devoted to hobby material and, of course, books.

Paris Paris (photo from BoardGameGeek user Jouslare) is a quick, interesting little game in which players set up businesses at bus stops in Paris. Each round scores one or more business. Occasionally, a “grand tour” is triggered and an entire route is scored. It was much more interesting than Castle Keep, and beats Monopoly hollow. Not the most challenging game on the shelf, but it took a lot more attention than I’d expected. 

As I look back over the post, here, I notice that this is the first time—maybe?—I’ve used the designer’s name. But the fact that we know the designer of the game that this type of small-batch, high-production-value is why many people call these designer games. As opposed to the anonymous games you can pick up at Target or Toys-R-Us. In fact, we have his SdJ winner, Zooloretto, on the bookcase overlooking our game table. This focus on the designer, or the design team, is another reason that some people argue for the art label to be applied. I’ve talked about that, so I’ll add that I’m very interested in the rise of the designer, a topic I’ll have to get back to. It’s getting too late for much more typing. The cats are asleep, the temperature’s dropping, and there’s work to do tomorrow (though I’m happy to report that the office looks good and I’m catching up on the lost hours). 

Bastille Day: In Which There Are Storms

Wendy’s first music class, Kindermusik. She came home with an elephant-shaped maraca. 

Boxes from Dana’s grandparent’s house arrived. A variety of oddments. Dress patterns, old coins, macrame plant holders, hats and scarves, mugs, pitchers, cross-stitch. All the boxes smell like the musty stuff of old people. Stale perfume and old cigarettes. Everything’s out for an airing and washing.  

And we played three rounds of Castle Keep, a children’s game. We hadn’t played in a long time, we’d picked it up years ago at a local Goodwill. The manufacturer, Gamewright, does good work, so we like to pick up any complete games of theirs that we find at thrift shops. Because of a series of strong storms moving through the area, Dana’s head was throbbing. This painful reminder of the power of nature pushed us into a choosing a familiar, light game. At it’s heart, Castle Keep is a pattern matching game, but even lighter than Abracadabra. You match pattern (curly, straight, zig-zag) or color (blue, red, gold). Four towers, four walls, one keep per person—that’s what you’re trying to be the first to lay out. And I’m just going to breeze over the details, such as they are. The rules offer a variety of variants, including a solitaire game, and we played one of them: Empire. Nice, heavy tiles. Bright colors and patterns. Cute details on the tiles (sheep, horses, and so on). Great kids game, though there’s a possibility for screwing with your opponents that you’ll want to talk about before you sit down to play. Unless your family is OK with that sort of behavior. 

 

The game is fun, but not deep, and it can devolve mechanically pretty quickly. The question is: what interesting choices do I have? In Jambo, you had quite a few. Play into your market, add a utility, sell products, use an animal or other person. That idea of the interesting choice is what keeps me coming back to games. A game can collapse time. Many days of selling, many seasons of farming, months at the French court, all take place in a matter of an hour or two. Of course, this collapse also strips levels of detail out, it abstracts the experience. The level of abstraction can be reduced down to the level of, say, chess, go, or checkers (or myriad other games) where the algorithms of the design meet the ruleset and you engage your partner in that intellectual space. That experience can also be fulfilling, but Dana and I like a little more window dressing. We like the fiction of character, the narrative built within theme. Even a theme-less game (or very close to themeless, see chess, above) develops a narrative, but that narrative is unadorned, like the game. I don’t think that the lack of adornment is a judgment; there’s a lot of excitement and delight in those narratives. 

So Dana’s knights built better keeps and kept mine at bay. Alas. So I will retreat, rally those remaining loyalists, and have another round tomorrow. Maybe as a metro designer, maybe as a medieval monk, maybe as Nixon or Kennedy. We’ll see.  

And as I type, a storm rages. Thunder, lightning. A temperature drop of twenty degrees. Another plains rain.

The Day the Lawn Was too Long

We both fretted about the length of the grass a bit before we sat down to play. Nothing like having a project that must be attended to! Last night we played Jambo, another in the Kosmos two-player series, a game set in Africa before colonization. Each player takes the role of a trader in central Africa and, with “clever card play,” earns gold by buying and selling goods (silk, hides, salt, trinkets, fruit, tea) from their stall (which is customizable, or at least enlargeable). Other cards expand the basic buying and selling. Animals, other people, and “utilities” extend options in various ways, so expect to do some reading for the first couple of plays.

The heavy use of text, I thought, was going to be a problem for Dana. I had picked up this game at an auction on Board Game Geek (you really should know this site), and I had thought that the wordiness would keep Dana from really engaging with the game. Not that she doesn’t like to read—she’s a literacy scholar—but the sort of gameplay that comes with text-heavy cards…well, it suggests a debt to Magic: The Gathering (still going strong, unbelievably), a game that neither Dana nor I ever embraced. Or even shook hands with. For me, I could nod at it in the halls at conferences or across a crowded cafe—sometimes I’d bump into it at shows or poetry readings—but that was it.

Dana was tired, but the game got her revved. She liked the satisfaction of completing a trade, building an economic engine. Caesar and Cleopatra’s theme still keeps her at bay. Politics doesn’t resonate so deeply.

Yes, Jambo is set in pre-colonial Africa, but the game has Portuguese and Arab merchant cards that offer a little of this a little of that. In a novel or movie, their presence might foreshadow the dark days that were to come. But games don’t seem to build that kind of experience. I mention this because I’ve been part of a discussion about “games as art.” I tend to fall in the “not” camp, but unlike Roger Ebert I believe that games are important to culture and as culture. Games are part of our human capital; we seem to make and play games about as much as we make art—or, as Dissanayake has it, make special. The problem of “games as art” comes from a tangled set of assumptions that people who champion games are trying to hack their way through to claim the importance of games, of paying attention to games, hell, just to make it clear that playing games is OK.

One assumption is that games are a waste of financially fruitful time. Second is that they are as bereft of meaning—and are as ephemeral—as comic books. Or tweets. To claim games as art is essentially to say that games are important. As far as I can tell, the claim is an attempt to place games up at the top of the cultural hierarchy. If it’s art, well, then, it’s worthy of attention and it must have meaning. And at some level, games do allow for narratives to unfold. A lot of work goes into designing the game. Many of these games are very lovely to look at. Yet I start to wonder: which games? I continue to have the feeling that the “games as art” claim sells games short. Art, generally, doesn’t offer a gamespace, doesn’t allow play—except in the interpretive process, perhaps. Games are important, I keep circling around back to this, as games.

Of course, there are outliers in this argument that make the whole discussion messy. Unlike Ebert, I’m willing to acknowledge my own limitations. Oh, and this isn’t about video games, which seem like a place where the Venn diagrams of the categories can really start to develop some intriguing overlaps. Or not. But I’m willing to explore the question a lot more. Hell, exploring that question is one of the reasons we’re here writing this.

And we’ve got to cut the damned grass.

The Day the Milk Went Bad

Poor Wendy! We had a rough day with the girl yesterday. Cutting molars is an ugly business. Watching her shove stuff deep into her mouth and start chomping made me think of the chewing antics of bored dogs. If only our mouths opened farther at the sides. Then we could get her a couple of rawhide bones and she’d be set.

To compound her misery, the milk I picked up over the weekend had gone—as the British say—off. We’d try to give her a sippy cup and she’d just gag. Not pretty, and a total mystery on our end until one of the cats turned up their nose at a puddle. A clue, we said, in manner of Poirot. So the kid was being forced to drink nasty milk while her mouth ached and nobody understood what the hell she was saying.

How to take time for ourselves after all of that? Games, of course.

As I predicted, we started last night with one of the oldest games known to humanity: mancala. Or, rather, a particular version of mancala. I have rules for at least two versions, not counting the 3M Oh-Wa-Ree game we have. This bean-and-bowl game has—well, as many variations as you might expect for a game that’s 1400 years old. Or older. But if all you’re using as game pieces are beans and depressions in the earth, then the evidence of your game play may not survive the night.

We read the slight rules that came with the board and started in. It’s a very quick, fluid game, and we both liked it quite a bit. We came within two points of each other in the first two games (James won first, then Dana). In the middle of the third game, my mother called, so that threw the balance off. Weirdly, it fell in my favor.

After those quick plays, we opened up Caesar & Cleopatra, one of the—now discontinued—Kosmos two-player games (it’s an interesting line, one well worth looking into). Dana was a bit put off by the game before we even began. The male character vs. female character was an issue, though we said later that it’s an easy choice for a designer/publisher to go with. You have two players…men and women are an easy binary. I could tell that she was not looking forward to the game when I mentioned that the rule’s default pronoun was feminine (“the first player can place one of her cards…”) and she snapped, “I got it after the second ‘her.’” I didn’t win any love by mentioning that the game seemed like the classic (and deadly boring) card game, War. It’s like War only as far as you play down cards and the highest card(s) win, but Caesar & Cleopatra has five columns of play, you have a hand of cards to choose from, you don’t always know when a column will get scored, and you have a small pile action cards that let you manipulate the game a bit. After she won (yes, it’s true, and quite handily), we talked about the role of luck in the game (moderate, but a card game will always have luck as an issue) and the ways that luck drives you toward tactical gameplay. My attempt at a larger strategy…well, it wasn’t pretty. She also said that she spent more time playing with and exploring the rules while ignoring to some degree what I was up to. And that small observation should be worth another entry, too.

We’ll come back to the game. Dana suggested that she might enjoy it better in a week. Two issues work toward making her open to the replay: she won, and she knitted most of a slice of watermelon for Wendy.

We’ve just started, but we already have more to talk about than just the usual Wendy, cats, list of things that happened at work. A very nice side effect.

Ahbra Kedahbra

 

The Lincoln Children’s Zoo houses its menagerie just four blocks or so from our house. It’s a nice little facility focusing on small—mostly cute—animals, and it has some playground equipment, durable sculpture, and a food court. The perfect place, in other words, to take a toddler so they can burn off energy. Yes, like at a refinery. So we went to the zoo, as you might have guessed, between naps. Two naps. Both for two hours. Travel just beats the hell of out a toddler.

And out of her mother. By the time Wendy was in bed, Dana clearly had sleep at the top of her agenda.

“OK,” I said, a little disappointed.

“But we have to play a game,” she said.

“No, no. Not if you’re so beat. I’ll find a way around this.”

“This would be a bad way to start this project, so we have to do something,” she moved blearily to the dining room table, “how about Abracadabra?”

Abracadabra is a little card game from daVinci and Mayfair games. We picked it up in Berkeley while we were on our honeymoon. It was one of the very first games we bought with the intention of developing a game collection. Originally from Italy, the rules translation is a bit rough. But we’ve persevered and managed to play the game many, many times—even with nephews.

The nephews were young, and the game is simple. Each card has a wizard or witch on it (a Gandalf old guy, a Harry Potter with a thyroid condition young guy, and a very young Samantha girl with fairy wings) with three characteristics: aspect (age/gender), school (robe color), and element (the color of the card border). From there, it’s a matching game. In any set of three cards you lay down, the characteristics all have to have some pattern, either all or nothing (all one element, all one school, all with different aspects; or, three different elements, all one school, three different aspects; etc). As you lay down a set, you pick up a corresponding card that gives you certain points (these remain hidden); first person to fifteen wins. It took us about ten minutes. The art is cute, but the game’s not that challenging. Good to have at the  end of a long day.

And did I mention that bottle of welcome-home champagne? That sort of slowed us down, too.

It did feel good, though, to start with something so familiar, something that reaches back to a lovely period of our lives. I hope that we’ll be able to hit some very old classics before long. I have my eye on our Mancala board.  

Enter the Aftermath

Banner day for Owl House yesterday. All nine of the people who said they’d show up did, indeed, show up. Karen, a recent arrival in town. Bryan and Shelly, the usual stalwarts. Joel and Brittani, first-timers, I think. Cody and Lupe, returning after a break of a year or more. And then Marianne and Dave, the last to arrive, first-timers, too, but among the last to leave. 

Before the others showed up, I ran a few errands to prepare the long, plastic folding table that we have. It’s hard to manipulate cards and other bits that are flat on that table, so I bought some felt and a grippy runner to keep the felt in place. A bit piece of felt in a lovely royal blue edging toward purple. But you have to buy a certain width as well as length, so I ended up with a lot of felt. Dana will use the extra material in some project or other. She has a host of amazing projects.

Shelly and Bryan had brought some light games that let us all sit down and get to playing quickly. We started with two rounds of Wits & Wagers and moved on to another game from the same company, Say Anything! We also had a metagame going on, a card game that Bryan had brought over called Say What? Each card has a noun or a verb, and you give a card away to anyone who says the noun or does the verb. First person to get rid of their cards wins. 

By the end of Say Anything! we had ten people—a much too large number for most games. We broke up into two groups of five to play Dixit, the recent SdJ winner. The game is stunningly beautiful. The real barrier to winning the game is the aesthetics. It’s far too easy to get drawn into the illustrations on the cards and forget what you’re supposed to be doing. We milled around after the games talking about the illustrations.

At this point we’d been playing games for almost four hours, and some of the players took off to pursue other entertainments. Those of us who were left—Bryan, Shelly, Marianne, Dave, Karen, and I—sat down to play Cable Car, a tile-laying/route-building game that came out earlier this year. Or maybe last year. I know that it was a re-publishing of a game named Metro. I had a little difficulty explaining the rules, but we got the game going eventually. It went over well with everyone but Bryan, but he didn’t complain. For the last game of the evening, we played Carcassonne on Bryan’s iPad. That iPad format allowed us to have a fairly lively conversation (and play with question cards from MooT), but the format made it difficult to focus on gameplay even as the machine made it easier to keep track of scores and tiles. An interesting conundrum.

The house emptied out by 8:30 or 8:45, just enough time to replace the furniture but not enough to get the games put away. One of our neighbors came over during the resetting with a sympathy plant and card for Dana, which was very nice of her. She helped me sling furniture around, too, so really just an all-around nice person. 

And then it was time to head out to the airport to pick up Dana and Wendy. I got to the terminal ten minutes before their plane was scheduled to land, but, as sometimes happens in Lincoln, the plane was twelve minutes early. I waved to them as they headed into one of the two elevators that functions as a bank of elevators in the small airport, but I nevertheless managed to lose them in the small building. When I finally tracked them down, Dana was frazzled (and had been for some time, the frazzling was not a new thing), so I followed Wendy around the building while the crew unloaded the luggage. And that was the end of the evening. 

Today, we’re off to the Kids’ Museum or the zoo, depending on the weather. And then Dana and I will sit down to some game or other this evening.