Tag: gaming

565: “All Players Survive” (Kenna Alexander)

                “If you all make it through to the end of Turn 8, then all Players survive and win the game for a collective victory! Time to celebrate!
                In addition, if one Leader has more Status Awards than any other, they are elected as chief among all of the communities and are granted an additional victory. Congratulations! […] while it’s great bragging rights to say you had the most Status and were elected chief, it can only happen if you all get a collective win first.”
                -Kenna Alexander, Wolves (2024) rulebook

                It may come as no surprise to folks who know me that I usually prefer cooperative board games to competitive ones. Concept (2013). Pandemic Legacy (2015). The Crew (2019). Tranquility (2020). Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast (2022). I guess I like working with my friends more than trying to outsmart them. But it was absolutely a surprise, at least for me, to come across Kenna Alexander’s wonderful Wolves. 
                Wolves is “a semi-cooperative game about community survival.” I read the rules today, working out how its mechanics work. Tomorrow we’re having friends over to play. Sitting now, the box at my elbow, I’m struck by how easily I accepted cooperative and competitive as mutually exclusive categories. I remember teaching a friend a game (I can’t remember which), and whenever we came across a moment where one player would make a decision without talking to the others, my friend asked, “So wait, is it actually cooperative?” The question made sense to me. It was cooperative, or competitive. It couldn’t be both. 
                Except of course it can. Tonight my partner and I met some friends to ramble around our neighborhood, enjoying night’s cool. We stopped at a neighborhood park with a zipline. During the day it’s alive with nine and ten year olds, but I guess we stay up later. We took turns. We talked about how we jumped and swung and approached the zipline to go the fastest, bouncing off the far end and returning as close as we could to where we started. We saw how far one another went. We laughed, and then we kept walking. It’s a little thing. And the more I sit with it and Kenna Alexander, the more I’m wondering how many of the competitions I’m part of can only happen inside a larger collective win.

by Azlan

529: “Evaluation: Erratic” (Pandemic Legacy)

                “Evaluation: Erratic.”
                –Pandemic Legacy (Season 0)

                I have an older brother, so I knew about Yoda long before I first watched the movie. I knew he was a teacher, silly and wise. Even if I didn’t know, I think the story—its shape, and the tropes it plays with—tells me to pay attention to this little figure in a little hut. His performance of unimportance is important. His power is just beneath the surface of the swamp, ready to rise. In that respect Yoda is different from almost all the other little creatures we see throughout Star Wars. His difference, his distinctness, is highlighted in everything from the camera’s attention to the precision of his character design to his humor.
                All the video and board games I’ve played build with something like this signaling. A game (by one definition) is about what I can do, and can’t do. It’s important for me to understand why landing on someone else’s Monopoly property led to me losing money. Playing the game (by this definition) is understanding, and pushing the rules around. Even in social deduction games where the point is that everyone doesn’t know the rules, the goal is to figure them out. To learn the limits of my doing, and to use my doings toward a goal. The game is about our agency.
                Which is why it stuck out to me last night when, playing the excellent Pandemic Legacy (Season 0), I had no idea why our team spies received the psychological evaluation: “Erratic.” I’m sure there was a reason. I bet it makes sense. But in this post I’m not really looking for it. I’m interested in the consistency with which I’ve learned that games are about my actions. I’m interested in how much of my life happens for bewildering reasons I can never sort out. How much of my engagement with the world unfolds beyond and outside my ability to control events. And here I am, walking through the rain I didn’t expect, trying to fix the doorknob that I didn’t know was broken. Making friends with someone who happened to say hello. What would a game be like if it celebrated the way that things go unpredictably, without any reference to my plan? Does anyone know a game like that?

by Azlan

504: “Taunted by Tigers” (Baker & Nephew)

                “…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.

by Azlan