Apparently board and card games are enjoying a bit of a resurgence. Our household is
Now the Apocalypse Sanity Plan involves compulsory attendance at the evening game of Ticket to Ride / Skyjo / Ravine or Scotland Yard. And I know you're in the house somewhere because NOBODY'S GOING ANYWHERE.
Ravine is a particularly good metaphor for our situation right now - except players are cooperating for survival against adverse weather events and animal attacks rather than a virus.
The premise is: Your plane crashes on a desert island. You escape with one useful item from the wreckage. Your goal is to survive until rescue arrives. Your odds of survival increase dramatically if you cooperate and share resources. (Universal Basic Income anyone...?)
Each player's health is represented with wooden hearts. One side of the counter is a full heart. This is good. The other side represents an empty heart. This is bad.
Hearts are lost via night time animal attack or bad weather and gained by foraging for food in the day. Occasionally a wounded animal stumbles into your camp at night which allows you to eat and recover hearts, or you accidentally forage for wasps or poisoned berries in the day and lose them, but generally speaking:
Day = good
Night = bad
All manner of awful things happen in the dark. When you are vulnerable. When you can't think or see clearly. When you are afraid. Bears, racoons, rabid wolves and mental weather patterns - any of these can befall you when the night card is flipped over.
Lighting a fire offers some protection, but you can only do this if you have wood that didn't get drenched last night. You can build shelter with foraged items to shield group members, but a mud slide or gale can flatten it in one night.
Some players can't cope. The uncertainty and chaos renders them insane. The effect may be temporary until they regain a heart - or permanent until death or rescue. It's part of the fun of playing, to not know these things...
There is a game changer though.
Something that turns this whole thing around and makes it almost unfair on the weather and the rabid animals.
We'd played this game over half a dozen times before we turned it over:
The Cave
PERMANENT shelter for ALL players.
Only after numerous untimely deaths, episodes of insanity and continuous trench foot from the unrelenting rain does the pure sweetness of this truly sink in.
Permanent shelter.
The gales, fog, mud slides and storms don't affect the structure of The Cave. It can't be flattened.
For ALL players.
No more rock-paper-scissoring for the tarp. Or freezing your arse off in the rain because you have chocolate or an adrenaline syringe.
Everyone can fit in The Cave.
In all the games we've played, if The Cave comes up, you generally make it until rescue day. This doesn't mean that life on the island is easy. The weather is still shocking and the concept of owning anything is ludicrous - resources can still be swept away in a gale, cougars still attack and you'll occasionally wake up to find racoons rummaging through your pockets. But The Cave will shelter and keep you.
You may go insane a couple of times before the game ends, but chances are you'll eventually turn over this card one day.
I don't know. It feels almost too early to post this. We've been in lockdown less than a week and I'm under no illusions that things are about to get a whole lot worse before they get better.
But they WILL get better.
We know how the story ends.
Some players can't cope. The uncertainty and chaos renders them insane. The effect may be temporary until they regain a heart - or permanent until death or rescue. It's part of the fun of playing, to not know these things...
There is a game changer though.
Something that turns this whole thing around and makes it almost unfair on the weather and the rabid animals.
We'd played this game over half a dozen times before we turned it over:
The Cave
PERMANENT shelter for ALL players.
Only after numerous untimely deaths, episodes of insanity and continuous trench foot from the unrelenting rain does the pure sweetness of this truly sink in.
Permanent shelter.
The gales, fog, mud slides and storms don't affect the structure of The Cave. It can't be flattened.
For ALL players.
No more rock-paper-scissoring for the tarp. Or freezing your arse off in the rain because you have chocolate or an adrenaline syringe.
Everyone can fit in The Cave.
In all the games we've played, if The Cave comes up, you generally make it until rescue day. This doesn't mean that life on the island is easy. The weather is still shocking and the concept of owning anything is ludicrous - resources can still be swept away in a gale, cougars still attack and you'll occasionally wake up to find racoons rummaging through your pockets. But The Cave will shelter and keep you.
You may go insane a couple of times before the game ends, but chances are you'll eventually turn over this card one day.
I don't know. It feels almost too early to post this. We've been in lockdown less than a week and I'm under no illusions that things are about to get a whole lot worse before they get better.
But they WILL get better.
We know how the story ends.
