Alfred Wallace: Um Thick

It seemed like a good idea at the time.  There was an iPod up for grabs; the game is neat; I’d never been in a tournament before.  But when I showed up at Metagames for the The Spoils pre-release tournament, not only did I get pounded like cheap veal, I also got the Cold From Hell.  My sense is that the typical collectible card game open-play room is one of Earth’s more dynamic disease distribution points, right up there with toddler daycare.  So, for the past several days I’ve been struggling with my cold.  Nothing deadly, but everything annoying.

And it’s not like I’m not busy with other stuff, after all.  I have quite the To-Do list.

1.  First, of course, there’s the weekly column.  One of these days it’ll occur to me that I can write one of these things well in advance and have them ready to go, and then I can get to bed on Thursday nights at a reasonable hour.  Until that day comes, I’ll keep relying on last-minute panic to pull me through.  I predict that in a week’s time, I’ll be fighting off tryptophan-induced drowsiness in an effort to sneak this in between the turkey and the pie on Thanksgiving.

2.  Then there’s the thesis.  It’s exciting; it’s dynamic; it’s thrill-a-minute.  I once so much as read off my title to a professor and he passed out from boredom right in front of me before I hit the subtitle.  Imagine writing it.  It’s hard enough without a cold.

3.  I tend to handle my To-Do lists by taking each item separately, and in random order.  If I manage to fill the list with enough fluff and styrofoam, maybe I’ll be able to avoid the bad stuff.  Or maybe not.  Anyway, Number Three is rearranging the sock drawer.  I used to have ‘em white-brown-black, but now I have a few different shades of brown, so that needs to be dealt with.

4.  Naturally, a lot of the rest of this is game-related.  [BRIEF NOTE TO ANY PHD PROGRAM DIRECTOR WHO MIGHT BE GOOGLING ME SOON: This is a purely satirical list.  Back in reality, the prospect of writing a dissertation fills me with an almost unnatural joy and I have every intention to bend every fiber of my being, every impulse of my will, towards its speedy and successful completion.] First up among the game To-Dos: Getting more games.  If it’s not one thing it’s another; right now, it’s Essen and the two three seven many games I feel I simply must have in order to maintain the game library at its optimum level.  Good thing I’m getting a better-paying job soon.  Along similar lines…

5.  There are games on the floor now.  When I moved into this apartment, I lined the walls of the biggest room with sturdy shelves for the games.  There was once room to grow; there is no longer.  (The second-biggest room got the bookshelves.  There are also books on the floor.) The goal was for there to be no games on the floor; creative shelving gets one only so far.  There are games that are on the shelf, but require the removal of virtually the rest of the shelf to get them out.  There is no more wall space.  Games have to go.  It’s amazing how angst-filled this can be, even though I maybe play five percent of the game library in a given year.  And that’s a busy year.  In all honesty, maybe twenty percent of my game collection is filler--the classic example being the wargame I buy because I don’t have a game on the subject...regardless of whether I have any particular interest in the topic.  For a while, I had a problem with buying Euros knowing nothing whatsoever about them; this has been largely cured but there are still a few I doubt I’ll ever play.  The real problem is the game that’s “OK.” I have a lot of games that are OK; I mean, sure I’d play Samurai and Katana if you saw it on the shelf and wanted to play; it’s not a game I’d necessarily suggest, though.  Magna Grecia, Rosenkönig, Theophrastus...they’re all OK.  Not good enough to be promoted; not incompetent enough to fire.  And thus they linger on.  I need to find some efficient way to rid myself of them; none are particularly valuable, so the trouble of taking a picture of it, listing it on eBay, extracting the money out of the buyer, shipping it out, and arguing about whether it got there is...sometimes not really worth it.  There’s a limit to how much I’m willing to do to rid myself of a tiny game that’s worth five bucks.  Maybe I should talk to Tanga--"Get one of Alfred’s lesser games for five bucks!  Limit three per customer!” (I don’t have Lucky Loop, in case you’re wondering.  You might end up with Shakespeare: the Bard Game, though.)

6.  Once (5) and (6) are accomplished, the next task clearly is to reorganize the games.  Never a task to be taken lightly, as we all know.  It’s a neat problem for packing algorithms, really, when the collection approaches one’s storage capacity.  I’m thinking I’ll have ‘em go by spine color this time; have the whole rainbow represented going from one end of the shelves to the other.

7.  And this is really a top priority:  Find one more person for a game of Wallenstein on Spielbyweb.  Game name: Scarlet Knight Fever III; password: bgn.  See you there.

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