Games night

"Did I tell you," Chief Loon asks as I tally up our scores, "that we received another $25 donation for the Wasp? That brings our total to $844."

"Awesome!"

"Yeah. I have half a mind to go down to the library with a check for six dollars, just to make it an even $850."

"You're still winning, by the way." I deal the cards. "By an embarrassing amount."

"I think I kinda like this game." It's a card game called Five Crowns. I bought it last winter from one of those games-and-calendars stands that pop up in malls all over the country right around November and vanish by the end of January.

"Me too. It's like a kinder form of gin, except with five suits and really nice artwork."

"I don't play gin." She picks up her cards and starts to rearrange them.

"No, me neither. Not with people, anyway. Gin makes me swear."

"What does vermouth do?"

"Don't know yet."

"Ah. Working your way through them alphabetically, are you."

I nod, concentrating on my cards.

Games night is something the Chief came up with last fall. At 7 pm on the first Saturday of every month, we (the Loons) open up the teeny little ex-train station that serves as Bellefonte's Chamber of Commerce building, hang out a sign that says, "GAMES NIGHT!" and play board and/or card games for three hours. The idea is that people can drop in and play with us, bring their own games, whatever. It gets announced in a couple of the local papers, and the Chief puts out a come-one-come-all message over the libraries' email the day before (did I mention we're coworkers? We are. Different departments, same building). So far, the only time anyone who wasn't a Loon (or a Loon's spouse) showed up was accidental. People asking directions, looking for info on Bellefonte, etc. Nobody stops in to play with us.

Here's the thing: I don't like playing games. Chief knows this, and thinks that I'm either extremely kind, I'm slightly masochistic, or she's a lot better with the guilt than she thought she was. I keep showing up because I have this image in my head of her playing solitaire for three hours or (as she put it jokingly at the last games night, when this subject came up) playing rock-paper-scissors by herself all night and losing.

It's not really accurate to say that I don't like playing games. I do play them, see. I even own a few. I don't like competitive people. I want to play just to play. My childhood friend Suzanne and I used to drive her mother crazy with the way we played badminton. She'd sit on the porch and watch us bat the birdie back and forth, back and forth.

"You do know that you're never going to score if you keep hitting it to each other," she'd point out.

"Are you keeping score?" Suz and I would ask each other in unison. Our unspoken common goal was to keep the birdie aloft as long as possible.

My family is full of poor losers and worse winners, and I still bear scars from a Monopoly game where my father swore at my mother. If I run into someone who must win, I get put off. At first. Then I feel the Beast rise within me and I need to win. I need to crush this person who presumes to think they can beat me. I want to send them home crying. That disturbs me.

And so, I play games online at Pogo against a computer whose feelings won't get hurt. Or I play with the few members of my family who are gracious winners and losers. I try to model my playing after my Grandma Ruth, who died a year ago this past April. She was an excellent game player -- anything you wanted to play she'd try, but she really liked cards, scrabble, and yahtzee best. She taught all of her grandchildren how to play some of the games she liked, and now the whole clan (and there are hordes of us. We could populate a town, these descendants of Grandma Ruth's) plays canasta, at least. Most of us play shanghai rummy, backgammon, and hearts as well.

She was cutthroat. If she saw an opening she'd take it, and she'd expect you to do the same. But when she won (which was most of the time) she didn't rub your nose in it. She'd just reshuffle the cards, or collect the dice, or slide the tiles back into the box, and say, "Again?" And whether she was winning or not, she always complimented the good moves you made, marveled with you over your stroke of luck if you rolled 5 6's as a double yahtzee, applauded your seven-letter word.

I try to be like that, and most of the time I can silence the Beast and be a gracious winner or a good loser.

As long as I don't play gin.

Mutts Gone Mad & my birthweek

Howdy! My birthday is next Friday, and I've decided to take all of next week as vacation. I don't know quite what I'm going to do with myself. Well, that's a lie. I do know of two things I'll be doing. I'm visiting the parents towards the end of the week for a combination birthday/anniversary celebration. I was a 1-day early second anniversary present. And tomorrow I'm going to be in Reynolds Park in Bellefonte from 11 to 2 with my fellow Loons, hosting a fun fair for dogs.

We call it "Mutts Gone Mad," and this will be the second one we've done. Last year's was pretty well-attended, considering the very little press we got. We're hoping tomorrow's crowd is at least as large and that they have just as much fun as least year's group. There will be contests of all sorts: a rally course, an agility course, a best-dressed contest, and (new this year) doggie limbo. I have no idea how the last one works. I guess I'll know more tomorrow. There are also no-pressure sort of games to play, like an IQ test, and bobbing for hot dogs. This game involves throwing a frankfurter into a full wading pool, and then letting the dog go get it. It's fun to see how the different breeds react. Last year, the retrievers were more interested in splashing around in the water than what was in it. There was a mastiff who tried to do a Moses and push the water aside with her paws, because she didn't want to get her face wet.

The whole event is free. The only thing we sell is food (hamburgers, hot dogs, drinks) but we don't keep the proceeds. Those go to the local animal welfare organizations, some of whom will have representatives there. Beagle Rescue is even bringing a dog who's available for adoption.

This year we had a reporter from Lock Haven contact the Chief Loon, wanting to do a piece on MGM (as we've started to call it). Chief didn't get the email until after the deadline had passed, but this reporter is still interested in us, and now wants to write about the Loons in general. Wow. I wonder how she heard about us. I didn't think we were that visible, really.

Well, that's it for now. Desk is organized so people have somewhere to drop problems in my absence (I'm writing this from work). Time to get the heck outta here. I'll probably post some pictures here and/or on Flick'r when I come in for a landing. Tootles!

It’s Murder, She Says!

I spent approximately 6 hours in a downtown café yesterday, plotting a murder.

I thought that might get your attention.

I belong to this rather odd group of people, we call ourselves the Loons. We are a group of civic-hearted, light-minded people who live in (or near) and love the town of Bellefonte. We are trying to do fun and rather goofy things in, around, and for it.

We're new. And that wasn't our original name. It used to be the Hysterical Society, but people kept thinking we were an offshoot of the Historical Society (we're not), and there was a worry that the Historical Society might take offense (don't want to irritate another group trying to do good things for Bellefonte) so we decided to nix it. Then we called ourselves the L.O.O.N.s, an acronym with no name to go with the letters. When asked what it stood for, we'd make something up--never the same thing twice. That joke shot right over a lot of peoples' heads, and I think we're starting to adopt the name "Loons," no acronym, because it doesn't take explaining.

We are the brainchild of the woman I spent most of yesterday with, and even though she might squirm when she reads this (she's one of the two people I know of who do read this), I think even she would acknowledge that she's our de facto head: the Chief Loon. I'm sure she knows if she decided she didn't want to be in charge any more, the whole thing would fall apart.

So anyway, the murder.

We're hosting a murder mystery event with a Victorian theme in general and a Bellefonte theme in particular. Bellefonte is heavy into Victoriana, by the way, and its residents are very, very conscious of its history. We're doing this as a fundraiser for another activity that will be coming up this summer, called "Mutts Gone Mad." It's a fair for dogs. We did one last year, and though attendance was light (it was our first), everyone who came enjoyed themselves. But more on that in another post.

Not really knowing how to proceed, the Chief Loon decided to do a little research. She found and read some how-to-do-a-murder-party type books, but the scenes were too heavily scripted. We wanted something more interactive, more of a role-playing game, so we decided to write our own. It's been in the talking/planning stages for a while, and yesterday around 3 pm the Chief Loon and I parked ourselves in a booth at Panera and started making things a bit more concrete.

The event is taking place in what used to be a train station, in the middle of a park in downtown Bellefonte. There are 8 characters and one victim, and after the victim dies, the characters all realize that each of them has a very good reason for killing this person off. They must then figure out which of them did it.

We had to flesh out the characters some more. Up to yesterday, we only had a paragraph about each murder suspect, and we needed to create in-depth back stories for each of them, including a very good reason why they'd want the victim dead. The mechanics of the game also needed to be sorted out--what would happen, in what order, when would clues be distributed, what would these clues look like, and so forth. Besides each participant receiving handwritten notes at specific times during game play, some of the Loons will probably act as a Greek chorus, providing clues in conversation with each other that all the participants are meant to overhear.

We managed to get 6 of these characters done yesterday. We did such complete back story for them, I'm beginning to see this more as a novel than a role-playing game. Who knows? Maybe it will be in time. We still have two more characters to work up. Not sure when that will happen. Next weekend, maybe?

A note to anyone reading this from Europe or Asia -- I know "Victorian" doesn't sound very far back in history to you. But you have to remember, I'm from a country that didn't even exist as colonies much before the 1700s. Anything older than 1900 seems ancient, and if something was around from earlier than the 1800s, it will probably have a plaque over the door proclaiming it as an historical treasure.

It felt good to flex the old fiction-writing muscle again. There were a couple of suggestions I made about characters that had the Chief saying, "Did you really just make that up? Wow."

I hope this is as fun for the people who come play the game as it has been to put together. I have a list of things I have to look up right now: did electric lights in the Victorian era have fuse boxes? When did police in the United States start using fingerprint evidence? We knew that cyanide smells like almonds, but what does arsenic smell like? What was/is the Pennsylvania Bar Exam like? I need to sort out something about military history in the 1870s as well.

Good thing I work at a library and like chasing down arcane bits of trivia.