Xover Xmas Party

Thursday, 16 December 1999

Today was an overloaded day. I had my choice of three ways to spend my evening: Have ice cream in Brooklyn with some friends, go see Evangelion: Death and End of Evangelion at a Parsons Anime meeting, or attend Crossover's Christmas party. I went with the last.

Usually Crossover holds its parties in rented rooms or takes out space in local bar/restaurants. This year we stayed at the office, played games (we are a game company, after all), and ordered food. Quake Arena was installed on a bunch of the Windows machines and I tried playing Quake using the mouse for targeting instead of the keyboard. It was awkward, but I did manage to do some useful sniping. Didn't keep me from getting my butt kicked though.

We also played a few games of Fluxx, a fun if lightweight card game with variable rules. I brought my Grass set, but we decided the rules were poorly-written and the cards poorly-designed enough that we didn't want to wrestle with learning how to play at that point. One day I'll have to finish writing up summary sheets so the game will become playable by beginners.

At the end of the night, the last four of us remaining played a game of Quandary, a really simple yet nifty game of investing. The game consists of 30 tiles (five colors numbered 0 through 5 once each in each color), a bunch (30?) of marker tiles in the five colors, and the board which has five colored tracks of six spaces each. Each player randomly receives a set of numbered tiles, and on each turn places one tile on the lowest unoccupied space of the matching colored track, and then takes a marker of any color. A round ends when any one track is filled (has all six spaces occupied by tiles), and then each marker is worth a number of points equal to the number showing on the last tile in the track of that marker's color. The game goes for round for each player playing, highest point total wins. Patricia and I came from behind to tie for victory.

Quandary deserves to be added to the national middle-school educational curriculum I've been building in my head; it's a simple and fun way to learn about some of the basics behind a market economy. (There were points in last night's game where I was investing in red solely because both Kevin and Chris were, leading me to believe that they must have had reason to believe that it had value even though it wasn't showing much value on the board.) Other items in this curriculum: The short story "And Then There Were None" by Eric Frank Russell, and George Carlin's famous "Seven Dirty Words" comedy sketch. And yes, I seriously believe that the children of my nation would be better off ofr having been exposed to Carlin's material.