Games for the Mind

Because I hate to let the blog lie fallow for too long at a stretch, I wanted to throw out a little thought that has been working around the back of my head.  It’s simple, really, an observation about how I play the Shab al-Hiri Roach.

I play the Roach like something between a cross of Rabelais and tragedy.  The mechanics all but guarantee that the characters will be victims and the color helps cement that.  The characters are people cast into a maelstrom of ill will, subject to the grossest whims of chance, and capable of being degraded beyond their control, through the agency of a mere bug, a bug that crawls into their bodies.

But it’s more than just that awful tragedy, though.  The mechanics of the Roach cards, with their injunctions to eat and copulate, to conquer and enslave, emphasize the sheer meatiness of the characters, their appetites, their physical presence, but as objects, as things to be consumed.

The brevity of the mechanical contact to the amount of game play enhances this, giving each scene drastic variability.  The single draw of a card, the single roll of a die, shapes the entire scene and its aftermath. 

There’s comedy that can come of that.  But beneath that comedy there’s a fear, a fear that drives the comedy.  It’s a vision of a world where hope and despair are mere accidents of chance, where people are mere containers, vessels, for animal hunger, where people can become awful things wearing the tatters of their humanity like shame.