Tom Chick wrote:


“Why are you playing these games?”

My friend’s son is a six-year-old. An inquisitive-six year-old. He looks at the world and wants to know things. What’s this? What’s that? Why is this? Why is that? I’m about to play a boardgame with his mother and some of my other friends. After he’s asked the usual what’s this and what’s that, he poses this broad question that most people would have to ponder for a bit, assuming they didn’t shrug it off because it was asked by a six-year-old. Why are we playing these games?

To my surprise, I don’t have to ponder it. Maybe it’s because it is being asked by a six-year-old (I find it’s best not to overthink things too much when talking to children). An answer immediately appears in my mouth, falling from my brain as surely as a Snickers dropping to the bottom of a vending machine.

“Because I like telling stories with my friends.”

Boom. Nailed it. I make a mental note to remember that answer because aren’t I clever? You can only embrace child-like sincerity for so long before adult cruft like self-importance and pride muscle in. But it’s what came to me, and I hadn’t even planned that answer. Now I’ll be ready if I’m ever asked that in a job interview.

Not that I don’t care about mechanics. I do. Deeply. They are the framework for the storytelling, just like a painting needs a canvas or a cathedral needs a foundation. But my favorite thing about games is the stories they tell, the stories we collaboratively create, whether at a table with friends or in front of a PC with a single-player game.

Massive Chalice is my favorite game this year because it tells a story I needed to hear. This year, having been diagnosed with cancer, my own mortality slithered into my day-to-day life. It wrapped itself around every passing hour. I needed to hear a story about transcending death. I’m not a religious person, so I don’t have any of those stories in my life. Which is fine when you’re young and you don’t have any skin in the game; cold existentialism and harsh science are simple — even obligatory? — up to a point. But then someone you know dies, or you turn fifty, or you live through a potentially fatal car wreck, or you’re on a plane that has to make an emergency landing, or that lump in your throat is stage 4 cancer that has spread to your lymph nodes. Suddenly it’s not so satisfying to feel everything in heaven and earth is dreamt of in our philosophy and God isn’t just dead, but he was never even alive and yadda yadda yadda Camus, cigarettes, Richard Dawkins.

Massive Chalice tells stories about how death isn’t the final word. On the contrary, death is a necessary part of the game, because Massive Chalice wants to be about how generations will inform later generations, which in turn will inform the generations yet to come, all of whom are indebted to the generations before them. It is life and mortality walking hand in hand, marveling at the passing centuries.