Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-08-03 - 9:54 a.m.

I'm Going To Be Very Rich

I spent the drive to work today designing a board game in my head.

I know board games take a lot of development, but I think there's something in my idea. Hear me out.

I thought of it because I spent a lovely few hours yesterday with my best friend, sunning ourselves and doing what women do: analyzing our relationships. That's what women do. We worry that old bone all the time.

Most men, on the other hand, do not sit in the sun and discuss their relationships. They discuss the stock market, or faster hard drives, or football. If they think about it, they think about how to get us to have sex more often.

So this board game is called Partners. It's for women. Not that men couldn't play. But they wouldn't. "Will it get me more sex? No? That's dumb."

The game board will have six concentric circles, plus a middle goal area. The course starts in the outside circle; you want to move through each one into the Seventh Circle, which we will call "Bliss".

You achieve Bliss by finding and keeping a (theoretical) partner.

Each player will have a space in front of her for six pairs of cards. A pair consists of one Feature card and one Flaw card, describing her partner. Each Flaw must be balanced by a Feature; each Feature must be offset by a Flaw. We're looking for balance here. A Bliss-worthy partner will be one with all Flaws offset by Features.

Flaws and Feature cards have different weights. They have to, don't they? But I can't arbitrarily assign weights. I mean, what's better, "Encourages Your Creativity" or "Is Compassionate And Helpful With Your Parents"? Can you really cover "Always Has To Be Right" with "Does His Own Laundry"? So when you get a card, YOU have to decide how important it is to you. You have six slots. The first slot is a minor Flaw to you, and you can offset it with a minor Feature, and so on, up to the sixth slot, which is the one that makes you wonder if you can keep this partner at all.

Of course, you may be dealt a Flaw card that you CAN'T live with and you know it. Depending on who you are, this might be "Has An Alcohol Problem" or ""Uses A Toothpick In Public." You must decide what you can tolerate. If you get a Flaw you can't live with, you have to turn the entire partner in, placing all his cards on the bottom of the pile, and starting all over again.

There's an aspect of honor in this game. Just because you have the first Flaw spot open, you can't just stick "Wears Your Underwear In Private" in there. You might have to reshuffle ALL your cards to fit that one in. And you can't cover a "Sleeps With YOUR Secretary" with a "Gives Frequent Footrubs". No, no, no, you're going to get challenged on that one, and you better be prepared to justify it.

There will have to be a pile of Wild Cards, too. Think about, "Travels Often On Business." I consider that a feature, but maybe for you it would be a flaw. What about "Loves Baseball", or "Wants To Have Sex Every Day"? See? Wild Cards. You have to put them where they fit in YOUR game.

This isn't really going to be a competitive game. All players can achieve Bliss, and it doesn't really matter who gets there first. In fact, there ought to be some way to HELP other players get there, too. Maybe there will be a board square that says, "Give one of your Feature cards to the player on your right." In fact, sometimes we give the entire PARTNER to the player on our right, don't we? Yeah, done THAT. (She ended up throwing him in, too, though, so I don't think I helped much in the Bliss department.)

Say you've got a partner, and the absolute worst Flaw he's got so far is something like "Uses More Hair Care Products Than You Do" or ""Owns A Speedo Swimsuit", and you're holding Features like "Attentive And Passionate Lover" and "Really Listens." And then you get the last Flaw card: "Doesn't Like Children."

Wow.

You can see that the turns in this game are going to be very long. This is going to take a lot of thought. Do you throw him in? Do you keep him? What sort of a Feature would really make up for that one? Can it be made up for at all? If you put him back on the bottom of the pile, will you ever get another "Really Listens" card again? This is going to take a lot of talking. "Gee...I dunno. You guys know me, what do you think I should do?" That's another reason men wouldn't want to play. They're all, "Will you for Chrissake PLAY! Roll the dice already!"

So that's as far as I've gotten in development. I think it's going to be a real winner. We play it all the time anyway; it's the thing we love best to do. We work for Bliss, and we get it, then we try to figure out if it's real, then we lose it and start over. It's endlessly diverting. So not only will it be fun, it's going to make me a millionairess, which might contribute to my Bliss. You can't buy a "Really Listens" card, you just have to get lucky, but at least my game edition will have gold tokens.

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