“…was taunted by tigers. You’re not the ringleader this time.”
                -Keither Baker and Michelle Nephew, Gloom (Second Edition)

                My family’s been visiting this last week, and in between cooking and washing dishes and lounging on the floor we’ve been playing games. Especially Gloom. Have you played that one? Each player is a kind of guiding ghost for an ill-fated family, and your goal is to get the characters in your family as miserable as possible—and then safely dead—while everyone else’s characters remain “happy, healthy, and annoyingly alive” (from the rulebook). And we’ve laughed. Laughed and laughed. I think part of the game’s fun, for me at least, is how it takes up the “good” and “bad” events that tropes imagine for us. Characters get happier (a bad thing, when you’re playing the game) when they do things like inherit money or get “wonderfully well wed” or are blessed by the pope. Characters get more miserable (a good thing) when they get hurt or “grow old without grace” or are “menaced by mice.” It’s all, in a way, exactly how you’d expect, except the goals are reversed. 
                In my day-to-day I avoid washing dishes, rushing along to the moment when I can “relax” by watching TV or whatever all else. I make my plans and try to stick with them. And then this week my plans are interrupted and bent and tumbled over with visiting family, and there’s something tiring in that, for sure, but there’s also something lovely. Gloom mocks my expectations for what’s supposed to happen. And it’s nice not to be the ringleader this time.