Off the Grid: Travel edition
Returning from hiatus, Scott Jon Siegel contributes Off the Grid, a column on gaming away from the television screen or monitor.
What happens to a gamer when he moves out of the country? Well, for one, he loses his group of gamer buddies -- the people he could call up to come over and play a cool new card game or board game with him.
He also loses a lot of his games; those hefty Carcassonne and RoboRally boxes are a bit too big to fit in his already-stuffed luggage.
But before he arrives in his new country of residence, our traveling gamer first has to get on a plane, prepared for many, many hours of recycled air and the same crappy film over and over again. What's our gamer to do?
Well, if he's smart, pull out his DS or PSP. But if our gamer is trying to keep it off the grid, or if he forgot his portable, then it might be time for some travel-sized game choices. It's a good thing he reads Off the Grid, huh?
The biggest problem with gaming on international flights is space. At best, you and a travel companion are seated next to each other, and you have the combined space of two tray tables to work with. At worst, you're flying solo in the most literal sense, and you're pretty sure the snoring woman on your right wouldn't make a very friendly (or willing) opponent. We'll work with the best case scenario for now.
A lot of good card games take up an unfortunate amount of space, rendering them unplayable in those tiny coach seats. Chrononauts, for example, uses up a lot of space in laying out the timeline, meaning there won't be any time-traveling for airborne gamers. Instead, when choosing a game to throw in your carry-on, pick something that puts more cards in your hand than on the table. Give me the Brain! is a perfect fit for cramped spaces, allowing players to keep most cards in their hands at all times, and only needing the tray space for the cards currently in play, and to roll the brain.
Dice games have a similarly small footprint, only requiring tray space for the dice, and having most of the gameplay occur on scorecards. A gold standard is the classic dice game Yahtzee, which has players rolling five dice to achieve certain number combinations. If your fellow fliers object to the sounds of plastic dice on plastic trays, lay down some of those napkins they pass out with the drinks and pretzels to cushion the sound.
None of those ideas pan out? See how many rounds of Rock-Paper-Scissors you can go through before convincing yourself that you finally figured out the trick to winning. That's a game in-and-of itself. Beyond that, the next best alternative is hitting the "travel games" aisle in your local Barnes & Noble. Magnetic Scrabble ain't such a bad idea after all.
The lone gamer is, sadly, a bit more screwed. Anyone with a deck of standard playing cards can play a multitude of solitaire games (Klondike, Freecell, Pyramid -- as seen on your PC). For the player who neglected packing playing cards in addition to his portable system of choice... well, maybe the inflight movie won't be so bad this time.
Scott Jon Siegel is a fledgling game designer, and fancies himself a bit of a writer on the topic as well. His words and games can be found at numberless, which is almost always a work in progress.
