3

A World at War Forums Sessions

New Thread Community Rules Bookmarks Forum Search

A life-altering game deserves this kind

of session report.
1.4K Subscribe

388 Posts 1 2 3 … 16

Soren @sorennarnia
Mar 5, 2013 (edited)

At Dawn We Ate Sugar

Smacks: Wargaming
Newbies Tackle the
Monster of Monsters

On a dark and stormy night toward the very end of our

mostly clunky relationship, I decided to finally ask my
girlfriend Isobel to play a board game with me. The game
was Amazonas, which is kind of a light set collection affair
with a little twist here and there, nothing very complicated
or brain-spearing, and quite colorful and friendly to those
not well acquainted with the world we gamers dwell in.

Almost from the beginning, the whining was nigh

unbearable. The apartment clanged and echoed with
phrases like “I don’t understand how I win,” “What do I do
first,” “Why am I doing this,” “What’s the point of this whole
thing,” and “This doesn’t seem very fair,” all punctuated by
the checking of the smartphone, the shuffling through the
music collection, the eating of the SnackWells, the
soothing monologues to the disinterested cat, and the
researching of the show time and garage parking
possibilities for a movie we wouldn’t even be seeing for
another week.

A couple of hours after this joyless experience, I lay awake

in bed wondering how I was going to most easily extricate
myself from this five-month episode of “Seinfeld,” because
the deal-breaker had finally arrived--and I don’t mean the
fact that Boris, the Siamese dybbuk who’d hated me from
the get-go, had once again chosen to sleep with his angry
furry butt aimed directly at my unprotected face.

Six months after that, I saw Isobel for the first time since
the breakup. All the anger was finally over with--the
senseless gnashing of teeth, the demands for the return of
her Bissell rug shampooer, the decrying of my very being
on no less than four types of social media--but the subtle
hostility was still there in her as she tried to corner me over
coffee at the National Gallery of Art and maybe extract an
all-purpose apology.

Isobel, I said to her at one point, we never really had a

chance. You have to understand that all my life, no human
being has ever given me an experience to match what I
can discover in my aloneness. There’s nothing I’d rather do
than be on my own with my imagination. People can come
in and out of my world and entertain me in fleeting
moments and fragmentary pieces, but in the end, even a
woman’s love interests me only until I can be alone again
with my mind open and awake and an entire day sprawling
out ahead with no obligations, no plans, nothing
whatsoever upon me. I suppose when all is said and done,
a blank book and a rainy afternoon will for me always
trump a smiling face, and if the blank book happens to be
asking too much of my overtaxed brain, I have the ideal
backups on call: cardboard bits pretending to be a
narrative, dice and wooden cubes purporting to decide my
fate.

And what will you do, she said, shaking her head pityingly,
what will you do when you wind up old and with nobody
around, living alone day after day? What will you do when
you suddenly realize that’s the worst thing that can happen
to anyone, and it’s too late to find somebody to love you?

And I said to her, at the worst possible moment to try to be

funny: I think I’d learn to play A World at War.

The European Axis put three RPs in military general

research and achieve a breakthrough, while the Western
Allies luck out and roll “6” for air range research, scoring
an early result. (Later this is balanced by a string of lousy
air range research rolls). Given the expected lighter
transport losses from this earlier than anticipated
research result, Eric is able to indulge his proclivity for
building big ships, and Britain lays down a BB5. The
German High Command scoffs at the British
extravagance, predicting “That BB5 will never be
launched!” – from “Slugfest at the Con,” a description of a
2006 convention game, Bruce Harper and Eric Thobaben

It was the box cover that got me in the beginning, the box
cover I would return to again and again for mental
sustenance, for a sense of purpose and validation in the
darker days of the quest which lay before me. The image
on the front of A World at War, as I first saw it in on BGG
when doing a little fantasy shopping for something out of
the ordinary, promised not a game per se but a brutish,
almost melancholy experience, a wintry slog through a
conflict in which there could be no real winners, and an
atmosphere of perpetual twilight. The experience
contained within this box would have nothing to do with
fun and everything to do with immersion in a place and
time far, far away from the concerns of my job and my iffy
bank account and the occasional worrisome flash of pain
that accompanied a cold beverage hitting my upper left set
of molars. This was the marketing copy which all but
delivered the killing blow to the purchasing resistance of
someone with my type of overactive imagination:

A World at War has it all: armor and infantry slogging it out

against marines and paratroopers; army planes and
carrier planes crisscrossing the skies with interceptors and
bombers and ultra-fast jets; battleships and cruisers and
destroyers feinting and jabbing with lethal carriers and
stealthy submarines. War is also waged within foreign
governments through diplomacy, and within your own
skunk works through research. So grab every advantage
you can get, every advantage--not just in sortie range and
torpedo detonators, but also in drabber things like oil and
boots: oil from those rich oil fields to the south, and boots
for tromping through those cruel winters in the north.

Oil and boots. Yes. For me, a fan of books and films that
trafficked quietly in relentless excavations of the human
soul only to produce more questions than answers, this
was the kind of board game I could identify with,
something that sounded almost literary in its ambition. If I
wanted a game, I would play Talisman or Kingdom Builder
or Incan Gold. What I was in the mood for in that vulnerable
moment of my life was the promise of embarking on an
intellectual adventure that would last for...well, however
long it took. I had no serious plans for either that day or for
the year 2013, frankly. Onto my Wish List it went, though as
you’ll soon find out, my level of experience in the war
gaming realm left me several inches too short to even get
on the carnival ride.

Cut to a drizzly Saturday in the suburbs a few months later,

when I was out by myself roaming around and just trying to
find a good place for General Tso’s chicken. (Cautionary
note: It ain’t House of Hunan in College Park, Maryland.) I
happened to wander into a little used bookstore that
looked like it would shut down permanently if I even
breathed on it too hard, and was delighted to find a shelf
bearing a dozen or so hobby games of no particular
correlation. And there it was, courtesy of my good buddy
Destiny: a very used copy of A World at War, one of the
only games I had continued to think about even as I
researched several other battle-based amusements in
preparation to make the move into a new arena of play. I
had to suppress a wide smile when I noted that the box
listed WWII’s death statistics on the spine. Wow. Any game
that just wouldn’t stop trying to go all Ingmar Bergman on
me had to be owned, and had to be owned right now.

I asked the guy behind the counter in the silent store if he

had any knowledge of this sleeping Goliath. He shook his
head in a desultory way, said that the games being sold
here were simply part of the owner’s insistence of flipping
anything and everything that could be hocked on the
secondary market. Have you ever played a war game? I
asked him. He actually had, it turned out. As a teenager he
and a friend had played a game called Gettysburg off and
on, but as he put it, “That got old kind of fast.”

Unfortunately, the copy of A World at War selling for $35 at

the used bookstore was priced that way for a reason. It
was missing dozens of counters as well as the core rules,
plus the map was partially torn. But I was sorely smitten
and I meant to have this sucker, and I meant to devote my
life to it. I wanted to barricade myself in my apartment until
the middle of the 21st century and become one with all it
offered. Later that night I hit eBay and clicked Buy It Now at
the first possibility I came across even as I pre-ordered the
second edition from GMT. In the blink of an eye I had sent
three hundred dollars into the ether in pursuit of a game
whose box and flavor text I just happened to have a man-
crush on. It’s decisions like these that explain why even
silverfish tend to think I’m a mental midget.

Okay, um, now is the part where I mention that I had never
played a serious war game all the way to completion. I
repeat: I had never played a serious war game all the way
to completion. Here was the sum of my grognard
experience as I stood beside my mailbox for the next
seven days, hopping from foot to foot as I waited for my
prize to arrive:

1. Trying to figure out the rules to Napoleon: The Waterloo

Campaign 1815 when I checked it out from the public
library at age 12, and giving up almost immediately, feeling
like someone had slapped me with a loaf of French bread;
2. Playing Risk on snow days with some friends down the
street during my high school years, and losing every time,
and spitting on everyone whenever I said the word
“Irkutsk”;
3. Three games of Memoir ’44--and I think I played it
wrong.

Lest you think I don’t have at least a light layer of cred

frosting, I will inform you that I was all over Avalon Hill back
when you could buy their offerings in toy stores--just not
the stuff that involved throwing imaginary grenades at
people. And there was one experience which made me
believe with infantile optimism that I was destined to
become a grognard someday. My mother used to go out to
garage sales a lot and she always kept an eye out for
board games for me; one day when I was about sixteen
she came back from a church fair with a monster war game
for which she had paid all of two dollars. I opened it up and
had a good laugh at the hundreds of loose counters
shaking and shimmying within, at the sprawling maps
frayed at the every corner, at the ridiculous rulebook which
looked more intimidating than anything Algebra II had ever
tried to lay on me. I had no intention of playing this
behemoth; back then I was all about Statis Pro Basketball
and Football Strategy and maybe a little Facts in Five now
and then if I wanted to really, you know, party.

In the bottom of that box, though, I remember there were a

few dozen rumpled and yellowed sheets of notebook
paper. I lifted them out and found myself shuffling through
the notes of the previous owners of the game, rows and
rows of densely packed calculations and notations
scrawled with great care in letters smaller than a tick’s
kneecap. Those anonymous psychos had actually made it
through this crazy game, and maybe more than once.
Those pages are all I remember of the game which I think
now that I may have actually thrown away--yes, into the
trash, just as I had done with a copy of AH’s Dune when I
was a wee lad. Which monster war game was that? I’m 99
percent sure, based on my memory of the art on the box,
that it was World in Flames. Please forgive me; I was young
and knew not what I did.

If you’re a grognard reading the above paragraphs, you

may have stopped laughing by now at the very notion of a
fatuous gaming tourist attempting to tackle GMT’s most
ornery title, but I doubt it. If you’re back to reading in bored
silence already, let me reboot your guffaws with the image
of this same man, who had found the rules for Warrior
Knights and Britannia too much to digest, proceeding to
download the A World at War rulebook for the first time
twenty minutes after sacrificing the remainder of his 2012
grocery budget to own the game. Keep in mind that the
copy in the bookstore had been missing those rules, which
were replaced helpfully with an index card taped to the
box bearing the website where they could be obtained. So
I had never even seen them.

Opening the PDF file that stormed my desktop that night in

a Higgins boat marked DESTROY THE NEWBIE, I
experienced what the Hillsmere Tiger Cats, the 8- to 10-
year old touch football team on which I had long ago
labored through a 1-win season, might have felt if our
coach had one day pointed to the Pittsburgh Steelers
coming over the horizon and said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you,
you bed-wetters are playing these guys every week from
now on.” The rules, whose total word count greatly
exceeded that of the Necronomicon and all its sequels,
were not just lengthy and complex; to my tiny brain, they
were a college textbook on advanced physics, the entire
Lexis-Nexis legal case database, and the Dead Sea Scrolls
all rolled into one, with a generous helping of How to Put
Your New Crate & Barrel Bedroom Set Together in 700
Easy Steps thrown in for good measure. Moreover, they
were not written for me, but for the considerably
experienced grognard. Some have referred with awe or
delicate disparagement to the “boys’ club” that is the cabal
of veteran players of AWAW, those who are regulars on the
game’s Yahoo forum and who try to make the pilgrimage to
conventions like the WBC in Lancaster, Pennsylvania each
year to show off their prowess, which has often been
developed since the game’s infancy. Nowhere is the
shadow of that boys’ club longer than in the rulebook,
whose 1-point type, lack of elaboration or extensive
examples, and matter-of-fact, stern-Dad prose made me
wish that Bruce Harper, the game’s designer, had just cut
to the chase and painted a big black NO TRESPASSING,
LOSER sign on the front of the box. Flipping through the
printout when it finally stopped torturing Tray 5 on the
Xerox machine at work, I knew that playing the game was
simply never going to happen, ever, despite numerous
online resources offered by the AWAW community to at
least let people like me dip their pinkie toe into the cold
waters of the Nazi-patrolled Atlantic.

“Oh, yes it IS going to happen,” I overruled myself. The

rules for AWAW had picked the wrong community college
dropout to mess with. Did they realize who they were
dealing with here? How much learning time I intended to
free up by locking Kingsburg and Witch of Salem away in
my closet? I did some quick mental math and decided that
my target date for making my first dice roll to resolve the
invasion of Chungking would be six months from reading
the rulebook’s first pages.

I commenced to slog on and off through the first section or

two of the rules, not even thinking about getting into
Production, Diplomacy, or Research for now, focusing
instead on introductory concepts like Look at the Pretty
Pretty Maps and Hey! I Recognize This D6 From Outdoor
Survival! The subtleties of the Ultra codebreaking program
and getting the Dutch to align with the Allies would have to
wait until I understood such basic menu items as zones of
control, attrition rolls, and what strategic re-deployment
was. I was even unfamiliar with the types of air and naval
units I would be dealing with. Interceptors? Bridgeheads?
Wha?

It wasn’t long before I felt lost, frightened, and itchy. Rules

in the core book are repeated often to make them easier
to access later, but for me this made it rough to know what
I should be focusing on right now in any given section and
what I could safely wait till later to comprehend. The sheer
number of exceptions to exceptions I would be dealing
with also threatened to leave my cerebellum by the side of
a long dirt road, and because I was not even an amateur
historian, the reasons for all the loopholes and modifiers
would never be clear until I seriously hit the books. Worst
of all, I wasn’t even close to getting a sense of the order of
things: what came first, what came next, what phases could
suddenly pop up between two others. After two weeks of
lying in bed after work with cups of chamomile and a
supposedly inexhaustible supply of patience, I was
mentally worn out. I decided to give myself a Saturday off
and spend several hours doing what I should have done
up front: punching counters, laying out the actual maps as
opposed to consulting my tiny printouts of them, and in
general mooshing my face into the cardboard bits that
would govern my existence for the time being.

Everyone in this hobby has, in his mind, the image of the

perfect gamer’s day. For most of us, it’s having a bunch of
friends gather at a familiar house, ordering pizza with the
works, and watching dawn melt into morning melt into
afternoon melt into night as game after game is played to
the sound of laughter and good-natured ribbing. Every
gamer has experienced that perfect day, and months
before completing an actual turn of A World at War, its
contents were kind enough to gave me mine. Imagine, if
you will, calling in sick to work on a rainy, unseasonably
chilly day, firing up the hot coffee, putting on sweatpants,
and sitting before a connected set of card tables on which
lie a dozen or so fresh counter sheets, the phone firmly
shut off, the wind whining outside. Add to this the sound of
a string of old episodes of "Gameopolis" playing on the
computer in the background and you’ve set the stage for
gamer’s bliss.

Working my way through the AWAW counter sheets and

sorting the pieces into ten separate Plano boxes, I was the
happiest of men. For God’s sake, I even had breaded pork
chops baking in the oven and a new can of Cool Whip
ready to blast the homemade hot chocolate that was
guaranteed me in the afternoon. When people fruitlessly
try to calculate the value of a game based on some
impotent price-per-play model, how blind they are to the
joy of simply touching all of a game’s components,
spreading them out on a table, reading exotic city names
on a map, and wallowing in the fantasy that all these things
before you are secretly brewing to give you the best time
of your life. That day seemed to go on and on and on. I
don’t have to tell you that there were naps involved too--
three of them, just one shy of my personal single-day
record of April 7, 2004.

The joy was short-lived, however; at some point, I had to

go back to reading the rules. For a while, I tried making
cheat sheets as I went, and more or less totally wore out a
new king-sized yellow highlighter. Nothing was clicking,
though. One day I was at my friendly local game store
(where, in a dozen or so visits, I had never been greeted,
asked if I had any questions, or gotten a good answer
when I did, so I use the word “friendly” loosely), I picked up
Axis and Allies and decided it couldn’t hurt at all to shell
out $30 to have this one as a WWII game backup to my
WWII game backup, which was the wildly unpopular
Blitzkrieg General. I intended when I got A & A home to
merely stick it on the shelf and open it only if my AWAW
journey came to a skidding halt, but instead I found myself
unboxing it right away and marveling at how, um, simple it
was. I could get this sucker going in a half hour or so,
maybe get a little taste of the sweep of the war...

No, I said to myself. NO. I wanted espionage cells, shifting

alliances, bomb research, battles in countries I had barely
heard of, stacks and stacks of log sheets, and a gabillion
tiny counters. And more obnoxiously, I wanted the
achievement of having learned a game that few others
could, to wear that badge on my sweater vest, to make the
pilgrimage to Lancaster in 2013 to get my butt walloped by
a grand master who looked and sounded like Christopher
Lee, but who would buy me pie afterwards. I did not play
Axis and Allies, not then. Instead I returned it to the closet.

Without missing a beat, I then put everything AWAW back

into its various storage boxes, sat down, and out of
nowhere, with no planning whatsoever, just sort of
quietly...gave up.

I accepted the fact that I wasn’t a grognard in about ten

seconds, that AWAW was nothing more than a prize
collection piece in another twenty, and that I was a total
loser for blowing so much money on a dream in thirty
more. “I like simple games,” I announced to the accusatory
stillness of my apartment. “I like Galactic Emperor, and
Disaster on Everest, and maybe, if I’m feeling saucy, a
round of Tigris and Euphrates. What am I gonna do--spend
eight hours at a stretch tracing lines of supply from 50,000
different chits? No, no, no. Blitzkrieg General can feed me
just fine--it’s got grand strategy in 10 pages of rules,
insufficiently proofread as they are. There just ain’t no
room in my life to spend twenty years on one game about
some war that most people think was faked in a studio
anyway!”

And I felt soooo much better. I was free of this madness! I

would look at AWAW’s box cover now and again in
fondness, kind of like a photo from an old summer fling,
and I would move on. “Whew!” thought I. “That was a close
one! Now, who’s in the mood for some Defenders of the
Realm?”

That night, I made the mistake of watching Werner

Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo on DVD, long a favorite movie of
mine. It depicts the quixotic struggle of one borderline
broke, barely sane man to cut through poison-spear-
infested jungle in a crazy attempt to find a trade route that
will bring him enough money to fund his dream of building
an opera house in a South American backwater where
even the fleas seem to have bedbugs. This was absolutely
the worst possible flick to watch when confronted with
huge obstacles in real life, and by the time Klaus Kinski
stuck that cigar into his mouth at the end, grinning the grin
of a man who came, saw, conquered, and dropped a few
unsightly pounds during it, I was ready to have another go
at A World at War.

This time in the saddle, though, I would not be alone.

I had intended to play AWAW as I far prefer to play most

games: solo. For me, board gaming has always played a
similar role to the one that doing crossword puzzles or
building model railroads fills for a lot of people: a chance to
get away from it all, work through an intellectual challenge
at my own pace, and spend the evening at my preferred
volume: low. I love strolling through a game’s space alone,
tweaking it however I feel like, giving up on a whim,
creating primitive AIs, and frankly, not having to deal with
other human beings. While I definitely enjoy the social
aspect of playing a game with a thoroughly vetted handful
of friends, my few ventures into unknown group territory
had been spectacularly regrettable. It took just two random
game club sessions over the course of a single month in
2011 to bring me into contact with every conceivable
negative gamer stereotype and frighten me back into the
solitaire life for good. My brain wilted at the memory of the
people I’d played with and now referred to privately as:

Pirate Guy
The Fat ‘n’ Angry Judge of All Things
Weird Silent Statue
Loves to Say “Dong”
Fanny Pack Girl with the Random Hair
Dances With Bizarre House Rules
Still Thinks Quoting Life of Brian is Clever
The Snarky Scarecrow

I remember the tense verbal sparring match that broke out

over a rules dispute when playing Bohnanza (Bohnanza,
for God’s sake), the tiresome folk who didn’t seem to know
when to give up trying to work a trade in Settlers of Catan,
the guy who couldn’t be bothered to slow down just a little
in rushing through the rules to Innovation, and the owner
of a copy of Ghost Stories who assured us all in every tight
spot that he had things under control and that we should
do whatever he said: “Just listen to me, shutup, I can figure
this out, just let me THINK.” I do lots of things with friends,
but in general gaming is just for me.

However, I needed a brain bigger than mine to lean on if I

was ever going to play A World at War. The message
boards and session reports I’d read were never going to
be enough, and I didn’t want to impose on an experienced
player--if I could even find one near me--for hours and
hours while I asked stupid question after stupid question,
shoveling my poor host’s expensive trail mix into my mouth
at a terrifying rate. In the darkness I cried out one plaintive
sentence: “Who, who will go through this with me?”

And the darkness answered, in a voice that sounded a lot

like Alan Rickman’s: “It’s got to be Troy, you moron.”

This is where things got interesting.

Germany misses its torpedo research result and the

Western Allies get an ASW research result. Britain places
a spy ring in Spain, which is immediately eliminated by
Axis counter-intelligence operatives, and Russia places a
spy ring in Turkey. Paris falls with light Axis losses …
Humorously, the two Free French AAF will not be built
until Fall 1944 due to British construction limitations.
More importantly, though, all the French colonies
automatically go Free French, giving Britain a strong
position in North Africa. – from “Slugfest at the Con”

I really didn’t know Troy Kiddell that well; we had met

through a mutual friend about three years before and our
association had been limited mostly to outings involving all
three of us, broken up by a few trips to Troy’s basement to
watch Jules and Jim and Metropolitan and Spirit of the
Beehive. He was a film nut and an intellectual dilettante of
the highest order, having dropped out of three different
colleges before he turned 25. Most of all, he was a little
crazy. His wandering path to weirdness began at the age
of 12 when he was arrested for trying to start a forest fire,
proceeded through an aborted attempt to ride the rails
with hoboes for a year in his early twenties, and soldiered
on through the only truly freaky act of his I almost couldn’t
believe was true: On a May afternoon in a community
college library, he had climbed up on a table and, feeling a
trifle provocative, shouted “I have seen the face of
Narcissus!”, an exclamation which was fully intended to be
as meaningless as it sounds. He was quickly asked to
leave. And he did so peacefully, having stirred things up to
his satisfaction. No doubt he went right home and
continued reading Finnegan’s Wake or the diaries of
Samuel Pepys or any number of cranially demanding
books he owned and would never lend out. For years he
had bounced from job to job, not especially seeming to
care what he did and never doing anything for more than
20 hours per week. Now 40 years old, he lived with his
patient but perennially grumpy father well out in the
suburbs, never having had a different permanent address.

I identified with Troy because like me, he was a man who

found work distasteful and life itself to be a rather
confusing, if not unfortunate exercise. He had never
figured out what he wanted to be, even as he wrote--for
himself, not for publication--long essays about the Roman
empire and why he loved both Tree of Life and Up the
Academy, plus a perpetually unfinished screenplay about
slum life in turn of the century Manhattan. Of women and
other vices he cared little to pursue; all he wanted,
seemingly, was the next foreign film, the next volume of
Lyndon Johnson’s biography, the next chance to say
something shocking in a public place. There was
sometimes brutal hostility deep inside Troy, launched freely
toward everyone from football fans to pretty girls, and of
course this hostility and lack of empathy for people he did
not truly understand had led to his alienation from the
“normal” world he relentlessly mocked, but damn, he was
funny, and damn, he knew a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff.
He was as good a candidate as any to aid me in fighting
the dragon. With just one proviso: He wasn’t a gamer. Not
in the slightest.

And yet…there had been a moment. An opening, if you will.

Three months before--almost the last time I had seen him,
actually--I had lured him over to my place with the promise
of lending him my copy of Cobra Verde only to overtly trick
him into playing Shadows Over Camelot. I had the
gorgeous game entirely laid out on the table when he
arrived so that he couldn’t help but take an admiring look
at it, leading me to suggest we take it for a spin--“I was just
about to play it solo,” I lied, while suggesting it would be a
good diversion while we argued for two hours about where
to eat lunch. He took the bait and we had a blast, each of
us running two knights and debating tirelessly about every
move. I left things there, not suggesting he come back for
a round of, say, Silverton the very next day; always leave
‘em hungry, I figured. I was content to bide my time and let
the memory of our session stew and bubble in his brain
before launching another offensive at a later date. Our one
game of Shadows Over Camelot, plus the fact that it was
Troy who had originally turned me on to reading
Dispatches and watching A Midnight Clear, led me to pin
my hopes on him as an AWAW opponent. It wasn’t much,
and frankly I didn’t expect him to want to spend that much
time engaged with any one person whatever the endeavor,
but I was desperate. And I realized that subterfuge once
again would be necessary to get him on board--subterfuge
on an MI5 level.

I e-mailed Troy and told him I had a day off coming up and
we should have lunch--I would come to wherever he
happened to be on a sunny Tuesday, which, to my shock,
turned out to be a place of business: Troy was working
again after many months of pure indolence, part-time only
of course, in the northeastern part of Washington, DC. I got
off the metro train at one of the system’s most moribund
stops and walked into a grungy, depressed industrial
section of town, passing graffiti-strewn elementary schools
and cops dozing in their cars, eventually coming to a
building with all the welcoming charm of an abandoned
chicken coop, located in a mazelike complex of decrepit
loading docks. Troy was standing in front of the unit where
he worked, taking a smoke break, dressed in shorts and an
Edgar Allan Poe t-shirt.

I pieced together the sad story of his employer over our

meal at a local Subway wannabe where lettuce went when
it couldn’t afford hospice. The owner of Troy’s company,
which cranked out middling-quality keychains, sweatshirts,
mousepads and the like for cruddier tourist trap gift shops
all over DC, was a Yale-educated gent in his thirties who
had once been a lobbyist and a labor lawyer. Tired of
dealing with “jerkwads” all day, he had decided to buy a
business to support himself and his two children in a
fashion becoming his uppity neighborhood of Cathedral
Heights, so he now spent his days in the armpit of DC
overseeing a sweatshop of immigrants as they fabricated
such imaginative merchandise as baseball caps with the
image of the Washington Monument on them. Troy was
making ten bucks an hour unpacking boxes and
silkscreening, “something to do for a while” so he could
save up and buy a decent video camera, or maybe an iPad,
and keep him in cigarettes so he wouldn’t have to bum so
much money from his father, with whom he shared a
predictably chilly relationship.

As we gobbled our food and rode the sub shop’s Free

Refills policy for all it was worth, we talked about maybe
watching A Woman Under the Influence sometime soon,
and then I told him I had gotten into a new strain of board
gaming. I explained what a monster war game was, putting
the best possible spin on it of course, making sure to
appeal to his ego by telling him the one I had just bought
off eBay represented what was likely to become the
biggest intellectual challenge of my life as I immersed
myself in the history and strategy of the Conflict of
Conflicts.

“That war has so many story lines, it’s almost as if it was

dreamed up by some poor bastard just to sell the movie
rights,” he said. “How long does it take to play this game?”

“Like six twelve-hour days,” I said. “It suffers no fools.”

“Ahhhhh,” he said, smooshing the bottom of his straw

down below the lowest layer of ice in his cup of Dr. Pepper
to see if something might surprise him down there. “I think
I want to play this game.”

My inner child sat bolt upright in bed, thinking he had

heard Santa Claus’ sled land on the roof above. “Yeah,” I
said, “I was hoping to suck you into it, because it’s a bitch
to learn, but if we were both having a whack at it, it might
go more smoothly. Can you imagine late nights defending
New Caledonia and planning the invasion of Guadalcanal?”