Thoughts About a Game Reporter in Essen

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Rick Thornquist, for
I ran fingers over the game collection in my closet with a sad smile
self-conscious looking at the old titles.

In my empty time, and shopping for future memories, I went clicking
into your online site, thinking of your convention reports!

What Euros and what eurekas! Whole family games
boxed by the dozen! Towers full of meeples! Cubes on the
game board, action cards in the insert!--and you, Moritz Eggert, what
were you doing playing a war game?

I saw you, Rick Thornquist, filming, watching the gamers,
poking among the stacks in the vendor stalls and eyeing the trade
bins.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who is the
game designer? What price this expansion? Is this game The One?

I wandered in and out of the online aisles of games
following you, and followed in my imagination by hordes of fellow
gamers.

We strode down the game images together in our
splendorous clamor ripping shrinkwrap, rolling myriads of
dice, and barely reading the rules.


Where are we going, Rick Thornquist? Essen ends in
an hour. Which way does your keypad point tonight?

(I read your reports and dream of a trip to the
convention and feel wistful.)

Will we walk all year through pleasing mechanics? The
stores add game to game, filling our houses, too many and we'll both be
lonely.

Will we play dreaming of the great games of old,
past hexes under the robber, home to our four colored monuments?

Ah, dear reporter, thin-necked, friendly old wire rim spectacled gamer,
what a web site did you envision when Aldie handed you the URL and
you received silent email in confirmation and stood watching the HTML
take shape on the great banks of the Internet!

Yehuda

(Supermarket in California, by Allan Ginsberg)