noodling about board games
Sep. 19th, 2019 11:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettThe last few times we've gone to board game socials I've played unfamiliar-to-me games with strangers without my standard preemptive spiel and it's been... fine? It's been fine. I haven't cried! I mostly haven't panicked! I've managed to say "I'd rather read the rules than have them explained verbally" calmly and factually and like it's no big deal!
I'm arriving here from a position of: my family, Mama and Papa and my mother and I, every time I visited the mouldering ancestral pile we'd have dinner, and clean up after dinner, and then every evening or almost we'd move through to the sitting room, and play Scrabble (and very occasionally bridge), the four of us with our own bits of novel or newspaper or whatever to read while waiting for others to take their turns, and we'd congratulate people for nice plays and demand definitions of unfamiliar words and generally exist in companionable quiet while engaging with ritual (while the sun set over the sea out of the window or the gales howled around the edges of the house or or or).
This is a very different approach, a very different style of play, to these socials, but I think I am beginning to understand some more of what people actually get out of this.
See, Adam ended up explaining LARP -- or, well, bits of LARP -- to my mother, on Sunday, over dinner, about systems and mechanics and stories and how these layer and interact.
I begin -- I say, wrapping up before I've really expressed the thought coherently, because apparently I'm very tired again -- to see how this fits together with board games, too: how there's sets of common underlying rules or mechanics, the categorisation of games as Werewolf variants or what have you, with story on top; how at least some of the interest in playing a wide variety of different things, instead of focussing on getting very good at one in particular, is to do with contrast and comparison and variety in flavour and seeing how things fit together and combine and so on, and what can be done with the available blocks, more than it is necessarily anything to do with any specific individual game. The story, perhaps, rather than the elements. The what-happens-if-we-take-a-world-and-emphasise-this.
It's a work in progress (I'm a work in progress), but I might be starting to get a feel for how to enjoy any of this, as opposed to Determinedly Acquiring A Skill. Perhaps.
I'm arriving here from a position of: my family, Mama and Papa and my mother and I, every time I visited the mouldering ancestral pile we'd have dinner, and clean up after dinner, and then every evening or almost we'd move through to the sitting room, and play Scrabble (and very occasionally bridge), the four of us with our own bits of novel or newspaper or whatever to read while waiting for others to take their turns, and we'd congratulate people for nice plays and demand definitions of unfamiliar words and generally exist in companionable quiet while engaging with ritual (while the sun set over the sea out of the window or the gales howled around the edges of the house or or or).
This is a very different approach, a very different style of play, to these socials, but I think I am beginning to understand some more of what people actually get out of this.
See, Adam ended up explaining LARP -- or, well, bits of LARP -- to my mother, on Sunday, over dinner, about systems and mechanics and stories and how these layer and interact.
I begin -- I say, wrapping up before I've really expressed the thought coherently, because apparently I'm very tired again -- to see how this fits together with board games, too: how there's sets of common underlying rules or mechanics, the categorisation of games as Werewolf variants or what have you, with story on top; how at least some of the interest in playing a wide variety of different things, instead of focussing on getting very good at one in particular, is to do with contrast and comparison and variety in flavour and seeing how things fit together and combine and so on, and what can be done with the available blocks, more than it is necessarily anything to do with any specific individual game. The story, perhaps, rather than the elements. The what-happens-if-we-take-a-world-and-emphasise-this.
It's a work in progress (I'm a work in progress), but I might be starting to get a feel for how to enjoy any of this, as opposed to Determinedly Acquiring A Skill. Perhaps.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-19 10:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-20 03:53 am (UTC)nnn I wonder if other sorts would be better.(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-22 09:42 pm (UTC)In terms of non-deception-based games, I have really enjoyed Splendor (COLLECT ALL THE ROCKS) and Photosynthesis (COLLECT ALL THE TREES) recently. For example.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-20 08:14 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-20 02:12 pm (UTC)So if one person doesn't like a particular game, that's okay! They can choose the next one. Most games don't hit the sweet spot for all four of us. The main thing for me is that we have fun doing something together that doesn't involve staring at a screen, and maybe learn or share something. And yes, the variety on top of sameness is good, in much the same way as one likes particular flavors of fiction or food - a thing that is familiar, but interestingly different from what you've encountered before.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-22 09:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-23 03:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-21 04:52 am (UTC)But yes! Board games definitely have certain stock types and then have story or mechanics laid over them to create instances of games. It sometimes helps a lot to have played the core game they're all basing themselves on so that you can figure out the changes to those rules that make this one different. (I much like the versions of Catan with role cards, so that you can still make progress even when everyone else is freezing you out on trades.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-22 09:46 pm (UTC)Which meant that I learned to play bridge sitting to Mama's left, with my mother as my partner and Mama and Papa as partners, with Mama as-far-as-I-can-tell deliberately playing as incompetently as possible in order to needle Papa. I can't say I blame her in the slightest, but it does mean that my calibration for understanding others' bidding techniques is, ah, highly specialised...
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-23 03:17 pm (UTC)So, I suspect that if I learned how to bid bridge, I'd often end up bidding one below where I should be.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-21 03:36 pm (UTC)my game experience: personally i find that i am not capable of being Good at any one thing, so i like a variety of enjoyable things at which to be Decent instead.
re ritual, that's an interesting one for me, because. I grew up playing Scrabble and Pinochle and Hand&Foot and maybe a couple others, but never with an air of ritual around them. My growing-up rituals center around food instead. (and religion.) I would like to create gaming rituals, but it's not something that's going to happen in this lifetime, at least not without some serious rewiring first. (will post more on this later.)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-22 09:47 pm (UTC)My growing-up rituals also had food & religion but Scrabble was... Also Very Much A Thing. *chinhands*
(it is SO GOOD to be hearing more from you, also I have tabs open for writing comments as and when I can scrape some word-brain together xx)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-22 09:55 pm (UTC)(unaskedfor ritual ramble)
Every Sunday for lunch we had Caesar salad, the kind where you make the dressing at the table in front of everyone even if it was only family there. That always struck me as one of our odder things. Essentially showing off for nobody. Any time we had caesar salad any other day, we used storebought dressing.
when you add it in with "day of rest" it seems extra odd. to do extra work on the day of rest.