- They have deployed their weapons! Quick! Engage evasive maneuvers!
- What?
- You, know… when you want to get away!
- What?
Boom.
It might seem weird, but I’ve done some thinking. This is a blog, and I’m hardly blogging. There are posts actually, but it’s hardly a chronological online diary, but rather a lunatic compilation of random thoughts and bizarre imaginary information. Well, for a change, let’s review a very frequent thing from my life: a card game called Race for the Galaxy.
OK, let’s not get carried away and expect a decent, outlined and planed presentation that you could find elsewhere. This will be more of a brief insight into my brain activities which arise while I’m playing this fantastic and mind-boggling game.
The first thing about the game, is that playing it properly is art. Pure art. Sure there is a lot of complicated interactions, little pictures and bits of text on cards you need to memorize and understand in order to play it according to the rules, but immersing your self in the game, absorbing it’s intoxicating and elusive nature requires far more effort, practice and patience. Often times I find my self literally lightheaded as I play the game. I feel as if even two brains like the one I have wouldn’t suffice.
There are two big parts of this game: an analytical brain of the game that is the card interaction, and an unfathomable soul – the player interaction.
The brain of the game is somewhat hard to grasp. You have to learn the rules, endure the frustration of cards not obeying your imagination and planning, and carve a handful of weird symbols in your brain using a dentists metal toothpick that you shove up your nose and scratch on the lobes. Well OK, let’s say it isn’t so hard after all you go through, having in mind the understanding of the games essence, the player interaction, the „phase selection“. It goes like this: the game consists of rounds, in which every player selects one of the seven phases that then all of the players will play, having the player that has selected that phase receive a small bonus while playing it. Each round of the game, all of the players select the phase that would benefit them the most, avoiding to select a phase that another player would obviously select, for that saves him a round of game in which he could select some other phase than the one that would benefit him the most, having the chance of having two phases played that would both be beneficial to him. Add a third player and watch your brain clutch in agony, for now there are two unpredictable phase selecting factors that are plotting against the others. Add a fourth player and watch your brain explode. Then buy the first expansion of the game, scrape your brain off the walls with a toothbrush, put it in a bag, use nanotechnology to reassemble it, add a fifth player, and watch it explode again. It will be more fun the second time, believe me.
Five player Race for the Galaxy game, is one of the most savage torments you could stick your head into. The first couple of rounds you will be watching closely on your opponents, their cards, face expressions, and phase selection. After that brief but agonizing experience, you will continue on just giving up on holistic approach, minding your own cards, calculating and counting, and isn’t it obvious by now – losing. You will lose so badly for not following your opponents plays, that you could easily assume that your brain was experimentally switched with a squirrels, done by mentally ill aliens, without you noticing, this morning while you were emptying your bowels. Then you will suspect that your opponents are actually the aliens that did this to you, for there is no possible way for a human being to follow his own hand of cards, four other plateaus of placed opponent cards, and four poker faces trying to persuade you passively that they are holding a hand of crap.
Then someone unfamiliar with the game will come along, watch the gameplay and simply say that the game is boring and looks like playing multiplayer solitaire. Well for a distant spectator it sure does look like a bloody solitaire game! And for a distant spectator he sure has a lot of nerve blabbering such nonsense out loud! And for such a rude and annoying person he sure deserves to be stabbed through his throat and tickled to death. But take my advice, teach him the game. And buy him a toothbrush.
Once upon a time, there was a spaceship, and his name was Rista. His friends from the shipyard called him Rista the earthworm, because he was the only one among them who was remarkably longer than he was wide. But Rista wasn’t just an ordinary spaceship. Rista was as fast as lightning, and even faster. Atrociously fast! Rista could travel through space so fast, that he could often see himself in the distance. Yes, Rista could also travel through time. He could probably travel even through pudding, if only there was someone silly enough to make so much of it. Rista liked to tell jokes while he was travelling, and he could speak very fast, to compensate the slowing of his personal clock when he starts catching up with photons. In his cargo space, there was always a lot of rum, for the jolly space sailors. There was also lemonade, for the sailors from out of his natal universe, because everything was upside down there, and so the sailors drank lemonade and never had fistfights.
One day, Rista had an idea to write down his memoirs. He did it in a few nanoseconds, but the captain said to him: „Oooh, my good Rista, my beard would grow as long as your exhaust pipe, if I was to read your whole memoirs. Hit one brief retell there.” And so Rista began to cut out, shorten, paste back and shilly shally over parts of his memoirs, and they all seamed equally important to him. He worked on it for very long, and had a really tough time doing it. From all that strain, he got stuck in some infinite loop, so they called a handy man to free him loose with a pair of pincers. The handy man also had a lot of trouble, but in the end he pulled Rista loose, and told him to look after himself in the future.
* Ok, it appears that I have invented the term „funnytale“. Excellent! It will represent a tale with humor in it, about fictional characters and happenings. You can attach certain adjectives to it, for example a sorry of Rista could be called a science fiction funnytale. There :)
# Pronounced „Reestah“
I guess you had to see it.. Billions of suns exploding in supernovae. Gigantic colosal swarms of green blue and purple clouds of dust and gas swirming in spirals. Space cramping in and out, squeezing galaxies together and ejecting them like fine dust of elementary particles. Fermions and bosons in a fearful mega thunder storm, all arround and everywhere. Tearings in fabrics of space, both matter and energy leaking. Horrifying and magnificent site, for those who see across upper dimensions. Maddening rage of a sonic fury, for those who would hear a universe in agony. Nowhere to look, for all is pure light. Nowhere to go for the space will bend you as well. And just then, in the midst of a madness, a soft voice of human recognition. It will pass soon. The time has an end here.
Sheltering sky
Ocean loading. Across the digital skies my afterbrain runs. Far and beyond the limits of mind, exists noone, and neither do I. Message implies: forever comprehend, forever think, forever feel. Hard to do, whatever the need. Where else to turn for wisdom, but in the self-shelled world of wordless thought.
