Dunsany Dreams 5

The Business Men and the Cat

In their stuffy board room with their overstuffed bodies sitting in overstuffed chairs, the great men of business looked over their plans for the markets and the stocks and all of the other things that they could control with their money.

And they nodded, very pleased with their wisdom, and said to one another ‘The future is ours.’

At the same time, in the alley behind the building, a mother cat gave birth to a litter of kittens. As she gazed at her feral children, the cat knew the future.

A kid’s game can just be an activity but it can’t be boring

Okay. I’m sitting down to do something that I really don’t like to do. Bash a children’s game. Because, in so many ways, it’s unfair and too easy to do that. You should not hold a game for someone under eight under the same scrutiny you’d give to a game for an adult. A kid’s game has different requirements but expectations.

But not only did Rivers, Roads and Rails from Ravensburger not work for us, I’m not sure how it would work for almost anyone.

R3 is a tile-laying game made up of 144 tiles that have segments of rivers, roads and railroads. The object of the game is make a continuous line of them with all the edges matching, just like just about any tile-laying game you care to mention.

But part of the problem is that on almost every tile, the paths are straight lines. So you’re building a single line of tiles and either a tile fits or it doesn’t fit on one of the two ends. There’s no room for choices or decisions.

A problem with the game is the rules. At least in the copy we got, the rules are printed on the back of the box and actually contradict themselves. If they were a little longer, they would actually being describing variations and not be contrary. The rules describe the game as cooperative and as competitive. You either all work together with all the tiles available or you compete with your own pools of tiles.

The problem with the game as a cooperative is that it’s really just a boring jigsaw puzzle with a definite picture. There isn’t the joy of discovery you get with an actual jigsaw puzzle. And the problem with the game as a competitive game is the lack of choices. You might have no choices, which is even worse in a kid’s game than having the game play itself with only one choice per turn.

Rivers, Roads and Rails is very pretty. I really liked the art. And I’d have really liked a fun activity, not even necessarily a game, attached to that set. Unfortunately, it just bored all of us.

Dunsany Dreams 4

The Perfect Rose

Old Man Memory took down a heavy book from a shelf in his library. Both the book and the shelf are covered in dust. The light of a single candle on his desk cast dancing shadows about the windowless chamber, making it seem darker than it would have been with no light at all.

Opening it up, Old Man Memory took a perfect rose, cut from the garden, and placed it between two pages. He firmly shut the book, pressing the flower as flat as the pages it lay between.

Old Man Memory put the book back up on the shelf with its new treasure. He knew that the perfect rose, now pressed, would dry and remain for many years before becoming dust.

Meanwhile, Youth danced outside in the sunlight in a field filled with hundreds of dandelions.

How did the world forget the Mad Scientists Club?

On a whim, I revisited The Mad Scientists Club, a children’s series by Bertrand R Brinley. It’s probably been at least twenty-five years since I last read it. I’d pretty much forgotten about the stories and, after rereading the first book, I have no idea how.

Hoo boy, rereading the first volume was a trip. It was like seeing a car wreck involving Mark Twain, Danny Dunn and a Boy Scout Manual. The books follow the misadventure and hijinks of a group of boys who are, in no particular order, explorer scouts, master engineers, and inveterate pranksters. All told by a narrator who has all the folksiness and self-awareness and snark of a modern day Huck Finn.

And the boys get themselves into some crazy messes, including making a fake lake monster and competing in a hot-air balloon race and saving a crashed Air Force pilot. The boys’ adventures are just a little larger than life. Almost all of them are grounded in reality and while their technology is cutting edge for the 1960s, it’s still in the ‘big trip to RadioShack’ range.

I have to note that, while the boys aren’t scoundrels and will help those in need, they’re more likely to pull pranks than save folks. I’m not saying that their moral compass is worse than my cats (and cats are born opportunists without a moral bone in their fuzzy bodies) but I find it surprising how non-preachy these stories that were written in the 1960s and for Boy Scouts are.

The books are far from perfect. They are dated, not just in technology but by the fact that if the club pulled half the tricks they pull anytime in the last thirty years, they’d be looking at serious time in juvenile hall. And while there are seven members of the club, I could only tell four of them apart. The other three could have been rolled into one character without losing anything.

That said, the voice of the narrator, being folksy and snarky and self-aware, is a lot more rounded and rich than a lot of stories I’ve read from the same time period. The setting may be dated but the tone is fresh.

I’m amazed that these books seem to be lost gems of children’s literature. The plots are fun and clever and the voice of the books is genius. There is some serious charm going on here. The quality of the writing definitely holds up and I’d recommend anyone even slightly interested to hunt them down.

Dunsany Dreams 3

Beneath the Tree

The poet sits beneath the cherry tree. In his hand is his manuscript and his eyes are shut.

From behind his eyes, there are dreams of the everlasting word. The power of the word to continue to dance in the minds and imagination of generations even after the bones become dust. Words that inspire until they are written in a dozen different languages for those would listen or those who read on every continent.

As the poet lies dreaming, he cannot see the rainwater dripping off of the leaves, dissolving the paper of his manuscript and turning the ink into black rivers.

What does tone do?

Websters defines tone as ‘general character, quality, or trend’, as well as ‘style or manner of expression in speaking or writing’. Okay, it also defines it in terms of pitch and musical quality but I’m not worrying about that.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that every game has a tone, regardless of what kind of game it is. Which was includes abstracts, RPGs and video games.

And while tone is an essential part of theme, tone is not theme. Every  element of a game, theme and components and the rules and the language of the rules contribute to overall character of a game.

Go clearly has a tone even though it has no theme and consists of a wooden board and two colors of stones. The austerity of its rules and its components let you understand what the experience of Go is going to be like. Quiet and calm until someone grabs the board and starts swinging. Go also has the weight of history behind it, which becomes another element of tone.

While I don’t think there has ever been a time when tone hasn’t been an important part of game design and game experience (I refuse to believe the unnamed monk or scholar who developed Rithmomachy didn’t want it to be more erudite than human endurance could handle), I think it has become more laser-focused as modern gaming has developed. As more games are developed at a greater and greater amount, every element ought to be seriously considered.

What got me seriously thinking down this path was the now venerable-by-modern-standards Guillotine, the jovial, silly game of competitive decapitation. With just a little tweaking and no rule changes, it could easily go to much darker black comedy or straight up horror. The light-heartedness was not a happy mistake but intentional.

Guillotine is a pretty heavy-handed example. I have a pretty good feeling if you did a more exhaustive study than I’m up for, you’d see a lot more subtle examples. You could probably write a dissertation about tone and Kickstarter projects, if that hasn’t already been done.

Theme is what a game is about. Mechanics are how you do stuff. Maybe one way to describe tone is what a game is trying to say.

Is SHOBU a newborn classic?

While I was at RinCon 2019, I passed by a table that had a bunch of boards on it that were clearly for an abstract. I asked some questions, got a sample game and found myself a substitute for the tournament when someone else had to drop out. I lost but I had a great time.

SHOBU is a two-player, perfect information, 100% determinist abstract, just to get that part out of the way. The game consists of four 4x4 boards, two dark and two light. In the official version, they are made out of wood and it comes with a thick rope so you can separate them into a light-dark pair for each player. On each board, you place four stones for each player on either side.

And, yes, it would be laughingly easy to make your own copy. But I’d still like to get a legit copy eventually. Partially because it is nice but also because I’d like to see more games like this out there and supporting designers and companies is how you see that happen.

Every turn has two steps. A passive move, where you move a stone on one of the two boards closest to you one to two spaces in any straight line. Then an aggressive move, where you move a stone the exact same direction and number of spaces on a board of the opposite color. And with the aggressive move, you can push an enemy stone off the board. 

Push all the enemy stones off of any one of the four boards and you win.

SHOBU is a knife fight in four separate phone booths and that’s part of what makes it so good. While smaller boards theoretically limit the number of moves and make a game solve-able, it also means that you’re in direct conflict by your second move.

And I freely admit that I generally prefer abstracts that are more about each move being a big, board changing move than a whole bunch of small, discrete moves. (Go is amazing but I also don’t get the chance to play Go very much anymore) SHOBU definitely has that.

At the same time, with four boards to keep track of and the restrictions on how you make your moves, SHOBU definitely has layers of consideration to out into each move. The game is definitely not impossible or even terribly hard to read but you have to think about it differently than you do in so many games.

It’s a definite example of a game where your first game will take five minutes and your tenth game will take an hour. But it will be an hour that will make you think and stimulate the little gray cells. Okay, maybe a half hour but the game steadily got deeper the more I played and I know there’s plenty more to explore.

SHOBU combines several ideas I’ve seen before and, in principle, is a simple game. But it uses those ideas to create something new (to me at least) and really makes me think. I don’t _know_ that it’s a newborn classic. BUT, it could be!