“Couldn’t you have a simple card game, like Old Maid?” I asked the boy. An 11-year-old cousin. Visiting for a week. He came complete with a couple pairs of underwear, a thirst to take a ghost tour in town and a Star Wars card game that requires a Ph.D. in quantum gaming.
“I already had Old Maid,” he said. “Lets get back to the instructions. Now leave your objective cards face up next to the force cards in the player area …”
The instructions! Whew. I stared blankly, trying to take it all in. Secretly I was hoping a grizzly bear would crash through the front door, creating a big enough disturbance that I could run away. (Or eat me. I was fine with either one.)
This was no easy-to-master card game. Not like Blackjack or Go Fish. Those you could learn in a sitting. This came complete with a 32-page instruction booklet. Thirty-two pages? I hadn’t read a book that long all year!
It was filled with passages like this: “An objective card with a resource value of two can be used to modify the square root of 78 if the Force is at 3 degrees on a Tuesday, but only if you have amassed enough resource tokens to slay a Banganese Bladeck.”
I smiled and nodded my head at the boy.
“Do you understand that part?” he would ask me.
“Oh sure,” I would reply while thinking to myself, “What is going on here? Have I been drugged? Where’s that damn grizzly bear!?!”
“Dad, are you really going to play this?” my daughter asked. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”
It was true. My mind was whirling. I felt like I was under some kind of Jedi mind lock. Maybe that was in the instructions. Maybe this kid had already mastered it. Maybe we would have to fight to the death with light sabers! WHY DID I AGREE TO PLAY!?!
Drool started running down my face. Brain cells were pushed to the breaking point. My daughter contemplated calling 911. I had started mumbling nonsense: “Yoda told me to travel to the Dagobah System. Yoda said he wants corn chips.”
And we hadn’t even finished the instructions. We hadn’t even started playing!
“So where are the dice?” I cut in.
“There aren’t any,” he told me. “It’s a card game.”
No dice? No board with pewter characters to move around? Hello panic attack, my old friend. It’s been a long time.
Then I remembered something about kids: It’s not about how you play the game. It’s that you play the game at all.
“He is so excited about this,” his mother told me. There was a huge smile on the boy’s face. “His father thinks the instructions might be a practical joke on kids. That they don’t really make sense.”
“Haha,” I said, trying to keep my throbbing head upright. “That would be funny on them.”
“So now we’re ready to play,” the boy finally said. “Are you ready?”
“Oh, sure,” I replied. “Now remind me about those resource cards while I wait on the grizzly bear.”