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I'm talking about games. He talked about card games, which are awesome and portable and quick to set up practically anywhere.
I love games. I don't care if I win or not or even, sometimes, if we finish the game. The play itself is what I like.
Saturday, I spent the day at the library, presenting several lectures, one of which was on games and gaming.
The books leaned up against the wall represent only a token of all the books I own on games and gaming. I have really old D&D game rules that were mimeographed and passed around by Dave and Gary before they were ever published as a real game. I play-tested games for Steve Jackson Games (and even dated Steve for a while - I was such a gamer geek!).
Even before then, I made up games. I remember convincing the kids in the neighborhood that the chinaberry tree behind our house was a pirate ship, and we'd play pirates in it. That ended the day 5 of the kids leaped from the tree and broke arms. So I took over the abandoned shed in the alleyway, and got them to drag furniture in from the dump (those days you could roam the dumps and haul off anything you wanted to for free). I pinned game pictures I cut out of magazines on the walls and painted game boards on pieces of wood planks because we couldn't afford to buy the real games. We used painted pebbles as game pieces and instead of dice, we made spinners.
We had marble competitions and jacks challenges and tiddlywink play-offs. When I was 8, I worked in a bar, replenishing the peanuts and popping corn, and I'd claim any decks of cards they would throw away. 8 year olds can't work in bars anymore, kind of a shame, I had such a great time - I got paid to pop the corn, but I made more money being a game partner and a storyteller. The customers would pay me to play a game with them, and they'd pay me to tell them my stories. They don't do those things in bars any more. It's pool or cards. Sometimes, in the rural bars, you'll get people who play dominoes or checkers or chess, and that's about it.
Hardly any bars stock Backgammon or Parcheesi or Shut the Box or Nine Men's Morris or Fox and Hounds or Go or Mah-Jongg anymore.
One of the games I made up that I still carry around with me is Trinkets.
It's a little organza bag filled with tiny charms and trinkets. There are lots of ways to play this game. You can spill all the pieces out onto a table, have everyone look at the pieces, then cover them with a napkin and let people name the pieces. You can do the same thing, except once the napkin covers the pieces, you reach under and remove 2 or 3 pieces, then remove the napkin and people have to guess which pieces are missing. You can pull out a set number of pieces and everyone has to make up a story about them. Or you can take a piece out, start a story with it, then pass the bag to the next person, who pulls a piece out and has to work that piece into the story. You can use the pieces to design pretty pieces of art. Or arrange them in alphabetical order. Or reverse alphabetical order. Or by color or shape or size. You can pair them up in "like to like" or any other type of pairing or grouping. This bag of trinkets has saved many a wait at the doctor's office or in schools or restaurants with kids.
When I grew up, I researched long forgotten board games and painted my own boards and made my own playing pieces, because the games didn't exist. I bought a lot of games, too.
I have Tunnels and Trolls, Bunnies and Burrows, Elfquest, D&D, RuneQuest, Traveller, Space 1889, and almost all of the steampunk ones.
The boardgames cover the classics like Chess, Checkers, Backgammon, Parcheesi, Chinese Checkers, Battleship, Risk, Monopoly, Life, Ouija, Clue, Scrabble, Snakes and Ladders, Hi-Ho Cherry-O, Mancala, Stratego, Yahtzee, 221B Baker Street, Mastermind, Jumanji, Mensch aeger Dich Nicht, Wizards, Y, Pente, Hex, Schotten-Totten, Ubongo, and Carrom.
Parlour games are also popular, the Laughing Game, the Captain's Cat, Charades, I Spy, and more. I have lots and lots of rules for many different kinds of games that require no supplies at all beyond the mind and the imagination.
Some of my favorite games, though, are the spur of the moment made up games that become "secret handshake" kind of games.
Rat Pucky was one of those games. Rat Pucky came about through boredom and a bean bag rat toy and some sticks of just the right size and shape. The rules are a weird cross between street hocky, croquet, golf, and horseshoes, with a frisson of doing something just a little daring and wrong. We perfected the game at renaissance fairs. You need a sturdy stick with a forked end. If one of the fork times is longer then the other, so much the better, and if the forks form a 30º angle, that's practically perfect. You can hit the bean bag rat like a golf ball, or shove it like a hockey puck, or loft it like you're shoveling manure. Points are scored for loft, distance, and/or proximity to the target. If playing in crowds, extra points are scored if you make the person the rat lands beside squeal or scream. All points are lost if the rat touches anyone. It was a street game of "mudmen" and peasants at the fairs, but like all historical games, what was once the pleasure of the poor became the province of the wealthy and Rat Pucky became an upper class game of Steampunks. Wearing semi-formal outdoor clothes, and decorating the pucky sticks and even the poor bean bag rat, the game is played among Steampunks with all the excessive civility of golf coupled with croquet. "Your turn, my dear Chomleigh." "No, no, I do believe it is 2 points to you, Henryetta." "By jove, that's quite the loft there, Bernice!"
In this increasingly electronic world, I feel almost as if I am a torchbearer for face-to-face games. When my house is excavated, centuries from now, archeologists will ponder the meaning of all the games and playing pieces I will have accumulated by the end of my life. Perhaps they will think my house was some sort of clandestine meeting place where we did outre rituals to appease bizarre gods of chance and luck.
One can hope, anyway.
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September 8, 2012
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