Games With Garfield

Even though I argue a lot, I am not really known as being a talkative person. I mostly work alone these days, so I don’t have the pleasure of the back and forth conversations that you get when you work in a game design group. I miss some of the old epic arguments I used to have with Robert Gutschera and Mark Rosewater back at WOTC, although their memories may be more in line with the title of this column. The one area that I don’t miss conversation, however, is when I am playing games. That brings us to the subject of table talk.

There are some games where table talk is unavoidable. If you are playing Diplomacy and you don’t talk up a storm, you will probably lose badly. Even some of the older classic games like Risk have a fair number of politics and table talk about who should be attacking who and why none of the other players should bother with you since you are obviously a terrible player and an insignificant threat, despite the fact that you somehow managed to take over half the board, presumably by luck.