Games at Greg's

Sunday, 20 September 1998

Yesterday I went to Greg Costikyn's place to play games. Not the role-playing games I play with Lisa and the others in that group. These were board and card games, the kind that used to be a major passtime in the US and still are in Germany.

First I stopped off at the library in search of The Rough Guide to New York City and Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained. I found the former, but had to make do with Dennett's Kinds of Minds in place of the latter. I picked up the Rough Guide book because I was very impressed with The Mini Rough Guide to Seattle, and figured that their New York book might tell me things about my city that I don't know. It is a very good guide book, and I might wind up buying a copy, just for useful info like when the free admission days are at various museums. Sure, I can find that stuff out on the Web, but it's useful to have it in a single bound volume that I can then lose under a pile of SF paperbacks and comics.

I got to Greg's about 3 PM, just as a game of Civilization (the board game, not the computer game) was starting up. I'd never played it (neither had four of the other six players), so I joined in, taking the side of Africa. We spent about three or four hours playing about a third of a game, with the turns taking longer as the game progressed, and we realized that we weren't going to finish in a reasonable amount of time, so we packed it up. It was enough exposure to convince Andy and me that Civilization deserves its place in gaming's Hall of Fame. It's an interesting and well-balanced game, with all sorts of fascinating interactions emerging out of its simple rules. I'm tempted to buy my own copy even though just about everyone I'm ever likely to play with owns one. With Hasbro's buyout of Avalon Hill, I don't know how much longer the game will be available.

I also played a much simpler, more social games called 25 Words or Less, in which a person has a certain number of words in which to give the others on his team clues which will allow them to guess the five words on a card. An average of five words is quite a lot, but the cluegiver has to bid against a potential cluegiver from the other team in which each promises that he can use fewer words than the other, and that establishes a lower limit than 25 words for that card. The bidding rarely ended above ten words in our game, and often went as low as six.