Games

When I was a child, and not playing pirate in the chinaberry tree, or castaway in the corrugated tin lean-to in the alley, or traveling to far worlds via the tool shed, or playing a version of Elven Chess (I didn’t know about Elven Chess back then, I called the game Mystery), I was playing Worlds.

Worlds is a complicated game, perfect for a rainy day or for a cold snowy day.

It takes some specialized equipment: special marbles, stones, and seeds held in a scrap velvet bag, a crazy quilt, and a hand-made deck of Story Cards.

Each marble, stone, or seed represented a world. Each world was different, held different species, and different gods, different fates, different characters. These marbles, stones, and seeds were cast upon the crazy quilt.

It had to be a crazy quilt because the randomness of the pieces was important to the game.

Then, the deck of cards were shuffled, and cards drawn until it “felt right”.

To play the game, we had to choose a focal world. To get to that world, we had to study the positions of the worlds on the crazy quilt. These worlds formed the “constellations” of the universe. We decided upon the stories of the universe by those constellations, and the stories that came from the constellations determined which world was the one we’d play that time around.

Once the focal world was found through the constellations (that was before I knew about astrology, I suppose, nowadays, were I to play this game again, astrology would make it easier to find the focal world), the cards were laid out in the order in which they were drawn. These cards would form the story of the game.

There were 45 cards: The Child of Stone, The Knight of Moss, the Owl, the Witch, the Eggs and Ale, the Harp of Bone, the Hallows Tree, the Mazey Wood, the Dryad’s Hame, The Rose, the Cage of Thorns, the Lame Horseman, the Scarecrow, the Evil Cheeses, the Dread Ship, the Sickle Sword, the Sibyl, Cloud, Swan, Winter, Badger, Summer, Mirror, Cracked Cup, Wren, Gallows, Web, Pomegranate, the Candle Lantern, the Lavender Wand, the Key, and a dozen more.

Reversed cards had a different meaning from the rightside up, sometimes very different.

The game played out on the world. Each time we played, the tales of each world progressed forward, sometimes by only hours and other times by eons. The worlds that had magic or space travel would move between the worlds, and there was a mysterious race that lived in the quilt itself.

That race was usually enacted by the cats, dogs, rabbits, or other pets I had at the time, sometimes with catastrophic results.

In the hundreds of moves and hte homeless times I’ve had, I’ve lost the bag of worlds, but I still have parts of the cards.

A few years ago, I cam across a deck of “Storyteller” cards that I had to buy. They aren’t as dynamic as the cards I created as a child, but they are a pleasant addition to the game.

I’ve been considering playing it again, but it really is best played with at least one other person, like Mystery.