M
ore games on the brain. Tonight, we went over to Tony, Karena, and Ella's for a lovely little dinner. Afterwards, they introduced us to the game "Left, Center, Right", which is a dice-and-chips game. It involves absolutely no strategy, but is pure luck. Now, I am a strategy games person. I love the process of learning how to speak a game's language, and have a conversation with another person in that language, while trying to outsmart them in the conversation. Randomness is not by itself a disqualifier here -- I like the randomness that, say, cards bring to the table. But pure randomness is its own thing entirely. In theory, I should hate it.
And I do, kind of. But I had a ball of a time playing "LCR" with all of them and Elena. I actually hesitate to say "playing", since there's not any real sense in which we, the "players", are doing anything. We're just spectators, gambling quarters on a random algorithm that we can do nothing to influence or predict. But -- we humans are pretty good observers as well as players. We put ourselves in the role of outsiders, almost. Outsiders with money on the line, but nonetheless "in the stands". So I stood up, and I bellowed for the rolls I wanted, and cheered when they went our way, and marveled every time Tony managed to roll three black dots (the best possible roll), despite not winning a single round. Elena and I walked away with six dollars in profit, purely on the whim of God, and had a lovely time doing it. I'm not sure I could play the game particularly regularly; but there is something to just watching something unfold when you have some stake in it. It gets the blood pumping, anyway.