Monday, May 4, 2020

Comfort food in the form of books and games

I find comfort food is a good analogy for both my reading and solitaire gaming habits during lockdown. Covid 19 is adding enough stress and complications to life that I don’t feel like adding challenging to my decompression.

Both L. Sprague de Camp and Rex Stout have featured in my casual reading during this time, which goes to show that comfort reading doesn’t have to mean garbage reading. I will say that it’s fascinating to read about Nero Wolfe, who practices extreme social distancing by choice, when the real world has to do that. Of course, his life style does require the rest of the world to be in good working order.

Gaming-wise, particularly since life usually gives me about five minutes for a solitaire  session, my recent interest in Roll and Write has come in handy. Set up consisting of grabbing dice and a dry erase marker is nice. They make for very nice ‘comfort food’ since they can hold a lot in a small amount of components.

And there are some really good Roll and Write games out there. I have gotten a lot of mileage out of That’s Pretty Clever during this time. While I have said Qwixx is the game that fires Yahtzee for non-gamers, That’s Pretty Clever is the game that fires Yahtzee for gamers.

But there’s a lot more Roll and Writes out there,  including tons of free PnP games. Now, I will fully admit that the Roll and Writes I’ve actually paid for are better most of the time than the free ones, the variety is really nice. Right now, they are perfect when we’re limited in where we can go and what we can get. And when comfort foods can be essential.

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