It is yer old pal Jerky's distinct pleasure, as always, to present an essay by one of the smartest people ever to dip his quill into an inkpot: our old pal A.C. Doyle! In this thought-provoking slice of melancholy memoir-cum-manifesto, Ace aptly expresses what we've lost now that games and gaming culture have all but completed their migration from the tactile, pencil-and-paper, cards-and-dice domain of the analog, and into the insubstantial pseudo-void of pixelated digital ephemerality. - Yer Old Pal Jerky
I enjoyed prep school, mostly, though as a scrawny little Catholic kid at a very WASPy establishment, I felt a bit out of it. My better friends were mostly day students, scholarship students, and minorities, and I felt a bit scorned by the scions of the Codfish Aristocracy. But one thing I vastly enjoyed, with the rich and well-heeled down to the most gormless nerds and poor kids, on a near nightly basis, after study hours ended at 10, but before lights-out at 11, was playing board games and card games. Oh sure, you could go down to the Common Room and watch a show, but unless Charlie’s Angels or Saturday Night Live was on, few of us bothered very often. The action was up in the hallways.
Everybody knew poker. The formalists played five-card-stud or five-card draw, nothing wild. None of this Texas Hold‘em, that is the only thing people ever play nowadays. Then the lesser players would play Baseball, because nearly everyone is guaranteed a good hand, when there are so many wild cards, and six Jacks would beat five Kings. Then the tricky kids would play the ones that leveraged the betting into bigger pools, such as Up The River Down The Creek. We played penny and nickel ante, quarter the maximum raise, and nobody won or lost more than ten dollars, but it was lively, with lots of talking smack and bad bluffing – “hey, does a hand where all the cards are in order beat one where all the cards have the same symbol on them?”
Not a single kid didn’t know gin, gin rummy, hearts, and spades. Most also knew hi-lo-jack, Oh Hell!, and cribbage. Bridge was a bit more esoteric, not in how it’s played, but in how it’s played well. You never wanted to be saddled with a bad partner. Also, even the best players would go home for summer vacation and would get asked to fill in on their silly mother’s Friday night bridge games with her silly friends, only to get their asses kicked… almost as if experience was more important than brilliance. Kinda like when Michael Jordan thought he could hit a baseball pretty well – emmm, but, not if it was a Pedro Martinez or Greg Maddux curveball. “Yes dear, you got 1500 on the PSATs, and now Mommy’s gonna hand you your ass at bridge.”
Nearly everyone knew backgammon, and had a board. Sometimes rolling those double sixes would get you out of a jam, or you’d roll the 3 you needed to get your piece back to the starting gate, but over five games, the better players invariably prevailed for at least three.
Some of the smarter kids had MasterMind boards, and I truly enjoyed that rather tricky combination of logic and lucky guesswork, with a finite limit of ten guesses. Risk was quite popular among some, as was Diplomacy, but they could drag on forever, particularly the latter (I stormed out on a few games when I was clearly winning, just because we were on the third or fourth night).
Stratego was somewhat popular, but I think by midway through sophomore year or so, the Stratego kids would realize they had to mature toward chess. I well remember the gleam in my eye when a boy would claim he was a Stratego master, but didn’t know chess. I’d inwardly lick my lips, and think “you’re my meat”. And he’d look stunned when eight or ten moves in my Spy had killed his Field Marshall. A good chess player just thinks farther ahead, through a greater number of permutations, than a kid who only plays Stratego. A few kids had Battleship boards, but those also grew to represent a “little kid’s game” by 10th grade, so they fell by the wayside.
Monopoly and Clue still had their occasional charm, as did some equivalent of Wheel Of Fortune, whose name escapes me know, but everyone tried to guess the letters of the cards laid upside-down in the other person’s word tray. Scrabble, de rigueur. Where the kids who were good at statistics and probability invariably beat the ones with great vocabularies. Hitting a triple letter score with the J in JAM would destroy a kid who thought he was being clever by adding “ELABO” to an already existing “RATE”.
