“Additionally, anyone can do the following Whoopsies:
>Drop a soapy dish, and break it.
>Change the subject.
>Lapse into silence.”
                -Jay Dragon, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, page 108

                Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is built around a lot of wonderful, changing game mechanics, One of them is Bingos and Whoopsies. When you play a character, your Bingos are moments of playing to your strengths, fully engaging in the moment and who you are, helping work through a difficult problem, and so on. Your Whoopsies are moments of weakness and old faults coming out, tripping up the situation even more. Both move the story— that is, the game—in different shifting ways. 
                I started this post because, when I sat down to write, I liked the silence more than the sound of my fingers typing. Hours before that some friends and I were playing Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast. The chapter we were playing shows friends trying to share their uncertainty about their place in the world while washing the dishes from a big celebration. In that chapter, all players have additional Whoopsies: break a dish, change the subject (as someone tries to share something important), or lapse into silence. In the context of the chapter, I think “lapse into silence” means stop trying to say something important, or stop trying to respond to the piece of themselves a friend has just shared. But as we played, as the game led us through our characters’ attempts to talk about their place in the world, we found other meanings in that silence. Some of the characters’ most open, connective moments were shared silences. Sitting down to write I kept thinking about that. I didn’t want to write it, not yet. I wanted to listen to all the little sounds of the house. To the sound of voices hours or days after they’ve stopped talking.
                Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is built around a lot of wonderful, changing game mechanics. One of them makes me think about how sharing our brokennesses—tangling a situation even further—can also be part of fully engaging with the moment and who we are together.