Framing the Conversation: How To Get Yourself Fired From An Ultra-Traditional SBC Church

I'd originally titled my first draft of this as "This Is The Post Your Mother Warned You About"... then I realized that I would write with more clarity & grace if I broke that monster into smaller bite-sized pieces. Mind you, this is not my author-ish equivalent of cutting up your steak for you. This is the author-ish equivalent of me deciding I didn't want to try and stuff a 10 oz porterhouse in my mouth all at one time.

And now that we're all longing for some A-1 and a baked potato, here's the first in a series of posts to discuss same-sex marriage I'm calling "Framing the Conversation." I don't intend them to be the Last Word on the subject - but I do hope they will help direct the dialogue into some new territory.

I've actually been fired from a ministry position. OK, that's not the way the Personnel Committee phrased it - they favored the weenie dodge of "we're eliminating your youth minister position in three months for financial reasons" which had the equivalent effect. Either way, I don't have a job & you guys just spent the last 45 minutes telling me about all the mistakes I've been making as youth minister while my senior pastor sits there like a bump on a log. (Table ready for Bitter, party of one... we can seat you right now.)

One of those "mistakes" (if you want to hear more of the story, you can check out How The Heck Did I End Up Here?) was some teaching I'd done about sexual sin. I'd explained to the youth that adultery (a husband or wife engaging in a sexual relationship outside their marriage) and homosexuality (a man or woman engaging in a sexual relationship with someone of their own sex) were both sins - and that one wasn't more or less sinful than the other. BTW, the "mistake" wasn't the content what I taught - it was that the teaching itself cut a little too close to the bone for one of the committee members.

But that teaching is at the heart of anything else that I write about same sex attraction & marriage. I really do believe that:

• pornography
• heterosexual sex between two unmarried people (fornication)
• prostitution
• heterosexual sex between a married person & someone who is not their spouse (adultery)
• polygamy
• group sex
• homosexual sex

...are all sexual sin of equivalent weight, regardless of the orientation and/or inclinations of the person(s) involved. They may have different consequences in a temporal sense - what effect they have during our lives on this earth - but they all have the same spiritual consequence. A quick example to clarify: someone who downloads pornographic pictures is less likely - at least at the early stages of the behavior - to have less emotional & physical health consequences than a prostitute. But both the streetwalker & the upstanding businessman with a hard drive full of downloaded videos are in the same boat spiritually - they've sinned.

Sin, btw, is not simply "doing bad stuff" or "doing stuff Mark doesn't like" or "doing stuff that is distasteful to someone/thing who has set themselves up as a moral authority." Man, I wish it was that easy - we could just change authority figures & get a new set of rules to live by.

According to Ephesians 2:1, you were "dead in your trespasses & sins." The two Greek words are paraptoma (trespasses) and hamartia (sins). The definition of paraptoma means "to go off the path, to wander," while hamartia means to "miss the mark or target." The implication is that sin is failing to be the people we were designed to be - people of purity & honor & integrity.

I'll get into this in more detail in another post, but God created man & woman and the marriage relationship not only for our pleasure & for procreation, but also to act as a picture of His love for us... and same-sex marriage warps that picture just as surely as adultery does. We've missed the mark... we are, as the old hymn writer put it, "prone to wander."

This means that we have to approach the conversation in a different way - this is NOT about "homosexuality vs heterosexuality." It is about marriage between a man & a woman vs a plethora of lesser & more destructive options - one of those being same-sex marriage.

#84: Snap - The Interlocking Dragon-Making Game

Snap: The Interlocking Dragon-Making Game

• designer: P. Joseph Shumaker
• publisher: Gamewright
• date: 2002
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: 3776/5.4
• age: 6+
• # of players: 1-4
• print status: in print
• cost: $8.44 (ThoughtHammer.com)

Snap is not a single game - it's a "game system" that allows for solitaire play as well as 3 other games of varying difficulty. It looks like dominoes... but with only four possible connections.

What makes the game work for younger kids (5+) is that the pieces lock together - and each color of dragon will only lock (puzzle-style) with another piece with the same color dragon. (Blank sides can also lock to each other.)

I'm not sure I understand the low rating on the Geek, except that the games work better with 2-3 players because downtime increases with each player. (This is one of the curses of connection games - the bigger the board, the more possiblities you have to play... and the more possibilities you have to play, the more potential for "analysis paralysis.") I'd suggest trying the game with 2 players first.

18 Years Ago Today

On this day back in 1990, Shari Jo Becknal walked down the aisle of Shady Oaks Baptist Church in Hurst, TX, and pledged her love & life to me... and I pledged the same to her.

I've never regretted it.

Happy Anniversary, baby!

Collin Made Mommy Another Card

This time it "read":

Dear Mommy,

I'm depressed. I did not obey God.

#85: Sandwürmchen

Sandwürmchen

• designer: Peter Lew
• publisher: Drei Magier Spiele
• date: 2004
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/6.1
• age: 6+
• # of players: 2-6
• print status: OOP?
• cost: $13.98 (cardhaus.com - this is a clearance price!)

Six baby sand worms have hidden themselves in their native habitat - sand. The folks at Drei Magier Spiele were kind enough to put it in the box - a lot of it! - so that the baby sand worms would feel right at home. Your job is to find them & remember where they have hidden themselves.

Yes, it's a pretty standard memory game (remember where the worms are hidden) but with some nice little twists. First, there's the sand. While some of it inevitably ends up on the table & on the players (it's very fine sand), it's really cool to dig with your finger for the worm, looking for a bit of color that says "I was right!" Second, there's the two-sectioned structure of the game:

• In the first part (the majority of the game), players flip over cards that tell them which worm to search for... if they're wrong, they leave the worm they've found on the surface & the next player gets to search. If they're right, they claim the card, re-bury the worms, and then have the opportunity to turn the game box in order to confuse the other players.
• The second part of the game occurs when all the cards have been distributed... the final six cards (one of each worm) are given to players in order (starting with the player with the least cards) - they place it next to the spot in the sand where they think that particular worm is hiding. When all the players have placed cards, the answers are revealed - and players who are correct get both the card & the worm!

The final score is the number of cards (1 point each) + the number of worms (2 points each)... and there's a tiebreaker, but I don't remember what it is. (Buy the game & read it yourself.)

As you've probably guessed, this is an "adult supervision" game... the combination of a box full of fine sand & small children is a recipe for disaster. (The rules suggest placing a towel beneath the box so it doesn't grind sand into the table surface when it's being turned.) Don't let that scare you away, however. My three-year-old begs to play this game - he loves digging up the worms & actually can play it pretty well.

#86: Floß geht's!

Floß geht's!

• designer: Susanne Armbruster & Helga Nyncke
• publisher: Haba
• date: 2002
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/6.8
• age: 4+
• # of players: 2-4
• print status: OOP?
• cost: EUR 9,50 (Amazon.de, approx. $14)

Today, we all decided to go rafting down the river, just like that American icon, Huckleberry Finn. We even borrowed the design of his raft. Though I'm pretty sure that Huck didn't use a big colored die to provide motive power to his craft.

And yet, that's exactly what you do in Floß geht's (literally "raft goes" in German)... on your turn, you move your raft down the river (made of out of beautifully illustrated puzzle pieces) to the next symbol that matches the one on your die.

But this is NOT a simple "roll'n'move." (For those of you who aren't steeped in gaming hobby lingo, "roll'n'move" is a derisive term for games that boil down to rolling the dice & moving that number of spaces - Chutes & Ladders, for example, is an infamous roll'n'move game.) At the start of your turn, you may roll the die of ANY player... thus slowing down a leader (if their die has a particularly good match) or helping yourself (if you're just drifting along). The die has 4 symbols that are found along the river... as well as a sun (a wild card symbol) and an anchor (which means your raft can't move).

Two caveats - though the game as outlined in the rules (go from one end of the river to another) works fine with the younger set, the game is more fun for the 6+ crowd if you race up & down the river. (This is a variant rule listed in the rulebook.) Also, although the game "works" with 2 players, it's much more fun with 3 or 4.

As usual, the Haba production on this game is splendid - nifty little rafts (complete with felt flags), chunky wooden dice, and the puzzle river/board, which my youngest son likes to play with even though he's not old enough to play the game "for real."

A Post That Isn't About Diagramming Sentences

Since the readership of my blog has risen up en masse to protest my blogging habits (well, not really, but I like to think that some of you care enough about my ramblings to be maybe a teensy bit irked), I feel a need to issue this apology:

• I'm sorry I missed posting a game yesterday to the Kid Games 100. It will probably happen again.

Thank you. That is all.

Long Knives & Buried Alive

I warned y'all that I was going to write something controversial in the next few days... well, this isn't it.

Now, you may or may not be one of those people who believe in hell... I'm not going to fight with you about it today. (Interestingly enough, a Barna survey from 2003 says that roughly 76% of Americans believe in a heaven & 71% believe in a hell - that is, of course, separate of trying to define those terms.) But I do want to give you a couple of things to think about - courtesy of a hippie guy who teaches people how to play...

You know the Jewish story about the difference between heaven and hell? The Rabbi goes down to Hell, and what does he see? The damned, standing in front of a great banquet table, each standing with a fork in one hand and a knife in the other and their arms tied to a long stick so they can't bend them enough to get the food to their mouths. "This is a helluva place" thinks the Rabbi. So he goes to heaven. And what does he see? The saved, standing in front of a great banquet table, each standing with a fork in one hand and a knife in the other and their arms tied to a long stick so they can't bend them enough to get the food to their mouths, feeding each other. (deepfun.com)

...and another from the prolific pen of a scholar of medieval literature.

About Hell. All I have ever said is that the New Testament plainly implies the possibility of some being finally left in "the outer darkness." Whether this means (horror of horror) being left to a purely mental existence, left with nothing at all but one's evny, prurience, resentment, loneliness & self conceit, or whether there is still some sort of environment, something you could call a world or a reality, I would never pretend to know. But I wouldn't put the question in the form "do I believe in an actual Hell." One's own mind is actual enough. If it doesn't seem fully actual now that is because you can always escape from it a bit into the physical world - look out of the window, smoke a cigarette, go to sleep. But when there is nothing for you but your own mind (no body to go to sleep, no books or landscape, nor sounds, no drugs) it will be as actual as - as - well, as a coffin is actual to a man buried alive. (The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves)

Heck, I like Clive Staples so much (did any of the rest of my blog readers spot the Lost character named for him this season?!), I'll give him the last word.

I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. (The Problem of Pain)

Framing the Conversation: Sushi & Molotov Cocktails

In the next few days, I plan to write about some pretty heavy-duty stuff that co-mingles theology, politics & sex... which means I might as well make a sign that says "Flame War - Y'All Jump Right In" in neon letters for the front page of the blog.

So, in order to preempt some of the potential problems I'm about to create, I want to go a couple of quick rounds with a dictionary to make sure we all are using one word correctly.

The word "tolerance" is defined in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary as:

• a: sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one's own
• b: the act of allowing something

That means that I can express an opinion about behaviors or beliefs that conflict with someone else's opinion... that's a disagreement, not intolerance. Intolerance would be me finding ways to silence another person before they could speak about those beliefs... or punishing them for doing so.

In real world terms, it's the difference between me thinking that people who eat sushi are nutballs on a chopsick for eating uncooked fish & me censoring any mention of California Rolls or throwing molotov cocktails into sushi bars...

There, that's taken care of...

#87: Biesti Boys

Biesti Boys

• designer: Howard Kamentsky
• publisher: Amigo Spiele
• date: 2002
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/6.2
• age: 6+
• # of players: 2-4
• print status: OOP
• cost: EUR 14,14 (Amazon.de), $4.99 (ebay - Elevator Eddie - used)

See, there's this hotel full of monsters - well, friendly monsters. And they all need to use the elevator - right now! So, we try to get the elevators to move up & down as quickly as possible by playing cards that are one more or one less than the number on the previous card... and we all play cards at the same time!

Yes, campers, this is a Speed/Espresso/Dutch Blitz variant that's simplified & streamlined to make for a really enjoyable gaming experience. In addition to the numbered cards (there are 8 floors to the hotel), there are STOP and GO. You can play a STOP at any time... which is kind of like having a kid monster on the elevator who pulls the emergency button. The only way to get it going again is with - wait for it! - a GO card. Anyone can then immediately play any number card on top of the GO card & get the elevator running again. You have a limited hand (2 cards, if I remember correctly), meaning you are playing & drawing cards as fast as your hand-eye coordination skills will allow to move.

As in all speed discarding games, it's easy for things to get confused, so we occasionally call a "time out" to straighten the piles. The game actually anticipates "freezes" - if everyone is stuck & can't play, the current set of elevators (and the cards on them) are discarded & a new elevator set put in the center of the table.

There's one more odd thing about Biesti Boys - it was also published in English as Elevator Eddie... but with different rules! As far as I can tell (I've never seen an actual copy of Elevator Eddie), the basic game is the same as Biesti Boys, except that you take turns. (Take turns?! Yawn.) There's also a "educational" set of rules, where you have two piles & add/subtract the numbers to come up with the answer. Double yawn.

The Kid Games 100 GeekList

For those who've found their way here to the Land of Aka Pastor Guy from BoardGameGeek, the whole concept of a GeekList is familiar. For those of you who hale from other parts of the worldwide web (do we even call it the "Worldwide Web" anymore?) - say, BaptistsWithASenseOfHumorVille or FamilyOfPastorGuy, a GeekList may sound like the scrap of paper that a video game designer takes to the grocery store with him:

• 24 pack of Coke
• 2 family size boxes of Cocoa Pebbles
• 1 mega-size vat of Red Vines
• toilet paper

In this case, it's actually a listing of the game on the Kids Game 100... but, thanks to the wonders of technology, they're listed in BGG ratings order rather than my rather arbitrary personal way of ordering them. (This allows you to compare & contrast - can you tell I was an English major? Next thing you know I'll be diagramming sentences & complaining about people ending their sentences with prepositions.)

The actual list is called (oddly enough) The Kid Games 100. I will be adding games to it as I blog about them here.

#88: Blackrock Castle

Blackrock Castle

• designer: Gunter Baars
• publisher: Schmidt Spiele
• date: 2001
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/5.5
• age: 8+
• # of players: 2-4
• print status: OOP
• cost: $16.50 (Gamefest.com)

There's a theme - of sorts - about knights venturing into a haunted castle to retrieve paintings of their ancestors while trying to avoid the traps. But it's really a memory game - as you can see, each set of four spaces has one corner that "collapses" when a pawn is placed on it. If you move across that space, your turn is over & you are returned to the previous space.

With that basic mechanism (move one of your three knights, determined by a die roll, until you fall into trap), you have a couple of wrinkles. First, you can't move through other players, so you have to use one of your precious (you get three) grappling hooks to get past particularly tight spots. As well, there are ways (I won't get into them here) for you to steal the paintings you need in order to pair them up & take them to the treasure chamber in the center of the board. The first player to get all three knights there wins.

The game is difficult enough using the regular rules - there are advanced rules where you turn the box (game board) every time you roll a circle on the dice (50%). Also, it works best with 3 players, which balances the speed of play (too slow with 4 players) and having extra knights to get in each others' way (doesn't happen much with 2 players.)

#89: Der Kleine Riese Kasimir

Der Kleine Riese Kasimir

• designer: Rudiger Dorn
• publisher: Goldsieber
• date: 1998
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/6.4
• age: 7+
• # of players: 2-4
• print status: OOP
• cost: EUR 11,50 (Amazon.de)

Designer Rudiger Dorn is best known in the boardgaming community for his meaty games like Goa, Traders of Genoa & Louis XIV. Since I'm not a fan of any of these games, it's a bit surprising that one of his kid game designs ended up here on my Kid Games 100 list. (To his credit, I do like Emerald, Arkadia, and Gargon.)

The story behind Der Kleine Riese Kasimir (which is translated as "The Little Giant Kasimir") is a benevolent version of Gulliver & the Lilliputians. Kasimir has found some toys to play with - which turn out to be the actual vehicles of the little people. After he takes a nap & awakens to find himself tied to the ground, Kasimir begins to cry because he won't get home in time for supper. So the players (in the role of the Little People) race to untie him so he can get home to his mommy & daddy.

The board (shown in the picture above) has a post in each area (a small chip). Players move their Little People around the board via an unusual system - each player has five wooden markers in the various colors of the board which they've drawn from the bag - they can use these markers to move to adjacent areas - and when they stop moving, they replenish from the bag.

Posts (chips) are worth various numbers of points - there are even a few chips which allow you to steal points from other players. Finally, there are three "timer" chips - when the third one is drawn, the game is over.

Now, that would be a nice little game if that was all there was... but there's one more wrinkle. When you pick up a chip, you must flip over another chip on a space of the same color. (And, yes, you can use this to hide a previously face-up chip.) This allows players to make some plans & calculate risks... and takes the game up a notch.

My first impressions of Der Kleine Riese Kasimir were so-so... but as I've played the game, I realized that there are some subtleties that aren't immediately obvious here - esp. when playing with younger children. This is one of those times when the age range recommendation makes a lot of sense to me.

Swingtown, White Guilt & Splitsville

For a long time, I've told people that when God speaks to me, He assumes that I have the listening skills of a three-year-old child.

For those of you in the audience who've never tried to give instructions to a 3 year old, let me make something perfectly clear. Saying it once is not enough. Saying it twice is not enough. Saying it three times, changing tone each time, is not enough. There is something in their maniacal little minds that requires you to repeat yourself over & over as if you were trying out to sing a new version of the Who's "I Can See For Miles"

I can see for miles and miles... I can see for miles and miles... I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles... And miles and miles and miles and miles...

Way to drive your point into the ground, Pete Townsend.

Anyway, I was talking about three year olds... well, talking about talking to three year olds - and somehow ended up quoting lyrics from The Who, which is pretty much par for the course when dealing with a small child. Suffice it to say that repitition truly is the power of learning, and never moreso than when going mano a mano with a toddler.

Which brings us back around to how God speaks to me - which really isn't even the topic of this post, except by way of introduction. I figure that when a subject keeps coming up, over & over, from a variety of disconnected sources, it's one of the better signs that God is trying to get my attention.

So, when CBS decided to debut a show about "the swingin' 70's" entitled, with props to the space cowboy stylings of the Steve Miller Band, Swingtown, it triggered something in my brain. "Mark," my brain said to me, "Mark, does it make any sense to celebrate a decade in which the primary markers for dolce vita were recreational sex & substance abuse?" And I, being the guy with the crackpipe remote in his hand, replied, "Well, it's network TV... which means they're going to pull a Cecil B. DeMille that somehow justifies episode after episode of popping 'Ludes & wife-swapping with a very special ABC Afterschool Special that shows just how unfulfilling all the hot, sweaty sex is."

Let's take a break for a second (btw, did I warn you that this particular post was going to be pretty free-form in structure? If not, the last sentence should do the trick.) and comment on a couple of references I made in the last paragraph:

• "Cecil B. DeMille" - the director of The Ten Commandments (both the talkie that you've seen and the silent version that I'm willing to bet you haven't) was known for making movies filled with sex & sinful situations that was "redeemed" in the last 1/2 reel of the film by overwhelming consequences. In other words, you can show whatever the heck you want if the person has to pay for all their "fun" in the end.
• "wife-swapping" - does this bother anyone else... that the best way folks in the 70's could come up with to express their wild new sexual freedom was to trade wives like Pokemon cards? And what about the implicit male dominance in such an arrangement - why not husband-swapping? Look, as a recovering porn addict, I known what objectivizing women looks & smells like - and this one reeks of it.

About the same time as the ads for the show (complete with a guy sporting a porn-stauche & people doing the Hustle) started showing every 15 minutes on CBS, I began reading a book about racial politics in the U.S. - Shelby Steele's White Guilt: How Blacks & Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. (I won't get into his argument right now - but it's worth reading even if you disagree with him. He has some very interesting things to say that will be particularly pertinent during a presidential campaign in which the race of the candidates WILL be a factor.)

In the midst of Steele's book, as he wonders about how Bill Clinton managed to get away with his own personalized version of Swingtown (thanks to redefining the words "is" and "sexual relations", with a nice assist from Senator Clinton playing the role of Tammy Wynette), he says this:

And then, simmering away behind all this from as far back as the fifties, was the idea that America, with its greedy "military-industrial complex," was essentially a "repressed" nation. Here a little bastardized Freud was mixed with Marx to make a rather neat formula: a sexually repressed society was necessarily a bigoted & oppressive society. Thus, the underside of postwar America's "gray flannel" conformity was social evil. But this pairing of sexual repression & social evil also had an especially appealing upside: it linked sexual openness to social virtue. The idea that a lack of sexual inhibition signified a deeper & more compassionate humanity became one of the more fabled ideas of the counterculture. Here casting aside one's sexual inhibitions was a way of opening up to one's deeper humanity and, thus, separating oneself from the dark human impulses to racism, sexism, and militarism that plagued the repressed, bourgeois world of one's parents.

And the two pieces clicked for me - one of the "trickle down" effects of the late 60's counterculture was the swinging 70's, where the whole thread of rebellion & rewriting history got lost and simply became an excuse to indulge in casual sex & dudes wearing too many gold chains.

Now, I realize I'm sounding like a prude with a capital "P" - so it's important to note at this point that:

1. I like sex. (Shari and I will be married 18 years a week from today!)
2. God likes sex. (He invented it, right?!)
3. I wasn't actually "swinging" in the 70's - heck, I'm not sure I managed to kiss anyone in the 70's (unless you count Spin the Bottle, and that, thank you very much for asking, still counts as one of the most deeply mortifying moments in my life).

Back to the topic - let's recap:

• God talks to Mark like he should be playing primarily with Fisher-Price toys
• Pete Townsend was smokin' a lotta dope when he wrote "Miles & Miles"
• Swingtown is a TV show
• wife-swapping sounds kinda sexist & way better for the dudes than for the ladies
• somehow, traditional sexual values got confused with racism & sexism
• what started as rebellion against the system (even if it involved getting naked) turned into a culture that pretty much glorified getting busy wid'it

Which brings me to the final "tap on the shoulder" from God to Mark "He Doesn't Always Pay Attention So I Have To Use A Metaphorical Megaphone" Jackson... an article in Newsweek magazine entitled "The Divorce Generation Grows Up". The author interviewed a number of folks who graduated with him from a suburban L.A. high school in 1982.

Reading the article was one of those "someone's walking on my grave" kind of experiences... as I also graduated from a suburban L.A. high school (well, Orange County, but it's the same kind of deal) in 1982. Hearing the stories of families falling apart and the ripple effect in the lives of those kids (well, if you can call 43 year old folks "kids" anymore) sounded all too familiar, even to me - whose parents are still together.

Although I grew up a few blocks from the "Brady Bunch" house, the similarity between that TV family's tract-rancher and the ones where my friends and I lived pretty much ended at the front door. In the real Valley of the 1970s, families weren't coming together. They were coming apart. We were the "Divorce Generation," latchkey kids raised with after-school specials about broken families and "Kramer vs. Kramer," the 1979 best-picture winner that left kids worrying that their parents would be the next to divorce. Our parents couldn't seem to make marriage stick, and neither could our pop icons: Sonny and Cher, Farrah Fawcett and Lee Majors, the saccharine Swedes from Abba, all splitsville.

The change had begun in the '60s as the myth of the nuclear family exploded, and my generation was caught in the fallout. The women's rights movement had opened workplace doors to our mothers—more than half of all American women were employed in the late '70s, compared with just 38 percent in 1960—and that, in turn, made divorce a viable option for many wives who would have stayed in lousy marriages for economic reasons. Then in 1969, the year I entered kindergarten, Gov. Ronald Reagan signed California's "no fault" divorce law, allowing couples to unilaterally end a marriage by simply declaring "irreconcilable differences."

Not since Henry VIII's breakup with the pope has divorce received such a boost: by the time my friends and I entered our senior year at Ulysses S. Grant High School, divorce rates had soared to their highest level ever, with 5.3 per 1,000 people getting divorced each year, more than double the rate in the 1950s. Just as we were old enough to wed, experts were predicting that nearly one in two marriages would end in divorce.

It's been more than a quarter century since the Grant High class of '82 donned tuxes and taffeta and danced to Styx's "Come Sail Away" at the senior prom, and nearly four decades have passed since no-fault divorce laws began spreading across the country. In our parents' generation, marriage was still the most powerful social force. In ours, it was divorce.

And then, the third piece fell into place - a counterculture that viewed sexual freedom as the equivalent of protest again "the Man" dribbled over into a period of casual sexual behavior inside & outside of marriage that became one of the causes that led to the pain of divorce.

Now, I'm not an idiot. I realize this is NOT a perfect line of causation - there are literally hundreds of other factors involved in the social & ethical upheavals that have happened in my lifetime. Still, just because something isn't the ONLY cause doesn't mean it isn't a cause.

So, why is God broaching the subject with me? I mean, it's not like I never deal with divorce in my job. As I've thought about it, I've come up with three things I think Jesus is trying to poke me with:

1. don't take your wife/life for granted - the fact that I have a good marriage is a tremendous & wonderful gift
2. pray for folks who are stuck in these situations - whether it's happening right now or happened 25 years ago... its' so easy to forget that, in the words of The Brain, "This is a pain that will linger."
3. write about it - which I'm doing

Today, I'm thinking about Jill... and wondering what happened to her. I still remember the two of us leaving a drama rehearsal one afternoon and asking her what she was doing that night.

"I'm going on a date... and so's my mom."

"Really?" I said. "That's cool that your mom & dad still go out on dates."

"No," she said, looking at me like I was a simpleton. "They're divorced."

An incredible sadness washed over me as we parted ways... I can still feel it lapping at the edge of my soul 30 years later. Here's a prayer going out to you & your mom, Jill, wherever you are.

Music Monday

One of the blogs I particularly admire (Steve McCoy's Reformissionary) has a regular feature called "Music Monday" in which Steve, being hipper than I could ever pretend to be, shares clips & info about cutting edge artists.

A long time ago, I started a series of posts on music called Soundtrack of My Life... and I've managed to finish a grand total of ONE. That's right... one measly post. Heck, I've written more about stuff I'm not even really interested in (Pat Robertson, for example) than I have about music.

So, consider the odd links & musical thoughts today to be my penance for making you wait so long for me to write about ELO, Talking Heads & Charlie Peacock.

Jesus Walks by Kayne West (post from Stuff Christians Like)

Then however, Rolling Stone offers one of the saddest and best put assessments of addiction I have ever read: “Over the next few hours, he hardly moves an inch. The strip-club environment seems to have tranquilized him. For someone who travels through life at hyperspeed and talks a mile a minute, West is unusually still and silent.”

T-Shirts (What We Should Be Know For) (music & lyrics by Derek Webb)

they'll know us by the t-shirts that we wear... they'll know us by the way we point and stare... at anyone whose sin looks worse than ours... who cannot hide the scars of this curse that we all bare

Jim Morrison's Grave (music & lyrics by Steve Taylor)

It was a manhole... Dug over at the edge of town... And a spray can scrawl... On the cemetery wall... Said, "You'd better behave"... Jim Morrison's grave

#90: Thing-a-ma-bots

thing-a-ma-bots

• designer: Bernie DeKoven
• publisher: Gamewright
• date: 2006
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/6.2
• age: 6+
• # of players: 2-6
• print status: in print
• cost: $5.95 (FunAgain.com)

Another favorite genre of kid game is the quick recognition game - flip a card over & see who can remember what to do or whose name to yell first. Thing-a-ma-bots takes that basic idea and goes it one better - the first time you turn over a particular robot, you get to name him/her. (For example, in the above picture, I could have well named them Brainiac 1000, WireHair, Catmogo, Horny, and FunnelCake.) So, when another card is flipped over, the first player to howl out their "given" name wins the stack of cards. If the robot matches the top of another scoring pile, yell out "Thing-a-ma-bot" and claim those cards.

What makes this one work is the combination of imagination & adrenaline - the silliness of the names blends really nicely with the excitement of trying to shout out the correct name.

#91: Rumpel Ritter

Rumpel Ritter (Knuckling Knights)

• designer: Gunter & Benjamin Burkhardt
• publisher: Haba
• date: 2004
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: 3467/5.6
• age: 4+
• # of players: 2-4
• print status: in print
• cost: $13.50 (TimeWellSpent.org)

Take one cardboard dice tower-like castle with a cardboard drawbridge (door)... add lots of little knights (pawns)... roll the dice & let the knights fall out onto a landscape with holes in it - and there you have Rumpel Ritter. If your child can count to three, they can play.

And while that may not sound like much, it's a lot of fun to play.

Sometimes, people argue that Candyland or Chutes & Ladders are good game for kids (shudder!) because they teach them basic skills: matching, taking turns, etc. Rumpel Ritter is proof positive that you can do those things (teach counting, taking turns, etc.) in a game that actually generates some excitement and heads toward a quick conclusion. (A "long" game of Rumpel Ritter is 15 minutes... and the only way that happens is if more than one player is in the running to win the game.)

My seven year old will still play this... but it was really popular with him when he was 3.5 to 4 years old. My younger son is just starting with this one & likes playing it.

#92: Yahtzee Junior

Yahtzee Junior

• designer: uncredited
• publisher: Milton Bradley
• date: 1991
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: 4301/4.6
• age: 4+
• # of players: 2-4
• print status: in print
• cost: $7.99 (CherryGames.com)

There are about 100 variations of Yahtzee Junior (well, maybe not that many) themed to whatever license that Hasbro can come up with... I even saw an Avatar: The Last Airbender Yahtzee Junior. The one pictured here, Toy Story Yahtzee Junior, is the one we have at our house.

The basics of Yahtzee are still there - five six-sided dice, three rolls per player to attempt to get the best score, scoring of one type keeps you from scoring that type again in the game. However, there are some changes that make the game easier for kids - and quicker!

First, there's a limit to the number of turns - with 2 players, you each have five turns (less with 3 or 4 players). One side of the dice is wild (Woody, in the case of Toy Story Yahtzee Junior). Finally, you're simply trying to roll the largest possible set of the same die faces (Jessie, Rex, Ham, Buzz & Potato Head).

Scoring is just as simple - take the appropriate marker of your color & put it on the numbered spot on the grid. Interestingly, this locks any other player from making that identical score - which does offer some (small) tactical decision when you're deciding what dice to shoot for on your turn.

For too long, the best known dice game for kids has been Cootie. (Which, btw, is the one of the worst games ever published. The only cool part was the plastic parts to build the insects.) Yahtzee Junior is accessible even for younger (3+) kids and involves some simple decisions. It's a great "training wheels" game to teach some basic gaming skills: probability, planning ahead, and simple scoring decisions.

The game does have a "top-out" age - my 7 year old now only plays when the whole family is playing - but for the 3 years he did play it, it was one he enjoyed very much. (BTW, I think the BGG rating for this game is way too low - you have to judge the game for the intended audience, age 3-6.)

#93: Cariboo

Cariboo

• designer: Forrest-Pruzan Creative
• publisher: Cranium
• date: 1998
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: 1624/6.4
• age: 3+
• # of players: 2-4
• print status: in print
• cost: $14.99 (Target.com)

More toy than game, Cariboo is a (mostly) sturdy piece of play equipment that manages to be both educational & fun. And, if you're willing to set your brain power on "dim", it's not a bad little cooperative game.

Players begin by "seeding" the balls into the board through the holes at the top... then take turns flipping over a card and finding a door with the matching element: color, shape, number or first letter. (More recent editions of the game have "advanced" sets of doors & cards, which would be nice. We don't have that.)

The player uses the "key" to pop open the door... and then checks to see if a ball is hiding beneath. If it is, the ball is removed (parent warning: kid fingers work better than adult fingers) and placed another hole to the side of the board. When all of the balls are found, the pressure from putting the last ball ends opens up the treasure chest... which, btw, both of my kids have loved. In fact, from about age 2 1/2 until age 4, this has been a favorite of both my boys.

You can play it "competitively" - in other words, whoever finds the last ball "wins" - but it's really a great game for a parent to play with a young child or for two kids to play together cooperatively.

#94: Baggage Claim

Baggage Claim

• designer: Alex Randolph
• publisher: Ravensburger
• date: 1987
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/5.9
• age: 5+
• # of players: 2-4
• print status: OOP
• cost: $6.99 (ebay)

Ravensburger publishes a nice line of small box games for kids - most have simple components & easy rules. Sometimes they're pleasant if not spectacular... and other times, they pack a lot of punch into their small packages.

Such is the case with Alex Randolph's Baggage Claim, a memory game that involves flying your (plastic) plane from airport to airport (symbolized by piles of luggage tokens) attempting to claim all of your lost bags. (One fateful day on the way back to college, my luggage went to Aspen while I had to go to Waco... my luggage is more upwardly mobile than I am. Anyway, the theme makes perfect sense to me.)

You must find your luggage in numerical order - the bags are marked "1" through "10". Only one plane (player) can be at an airport at a time, so if you want to land at an occupied pile of tokens, you must first allow the other player a free flight to another airport where he can possibly pick up a token. Once per game, each player is allowed to refuse to move - saving this refusal for the right moment is a key tactical element in the game. (The "occupied airport" rules make the game more enjoyable with 3 or 4 players, but it works fine with 2.)

Here's why it ended up on the list: it's a speedy memory game with actual tactical play.

#95: Prinzessin Pimpernell

Prinzessin Pimpernell

• designer: Heinz Meister
• publisher: Goldsieber
• date: 2003
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/5.3
• age: 6+
• # of players: 2-4
• print status: OOP
• cost: EUR 12,95 (about $19.50)

This memory game crossed with a race game almost has too much going on... you're collecting armor & weapons to fight the dragons while protecting (read: moving back to start) smaller knights even as the board shrinks as you pick up equipment. The age rating is not so much about the difficulty of the game as it is about keeping track of all the different things going on.

But once you get past all that, I think you've got a really nifty little game here. Each player has three knights (pawns) in three sizes... and on their turn, rolls three dice that correspond in size to their pawns. Starting with the largest knight, they move forward and encounter the space they land on. If it's grass, nothing happens. If it's a "lucky" space, they roll again & keep moving. If it's an armory, they guess which of the five different types of equipment (sword, lance, helmet, shield or armor) it is - get it right & you get to keep it. Get it wrong and your knight goes back to start (the Round Table).

The game has a semi-cooperative feel to it as well - if you get a 2nd equipment item, you give it to another player who doesn't have that item. And, though we've never seen it happen, the game can win if your knights make 5 unsuccessful attempts to rescue the princess from the dragons.

How do you succeed against the dragons? Reach the dragon castle & flip over one of their tokens - which have the five pieces of equipment on them. If you've got that equipment, you win & rescue the princess. If you don't, you are sent back to the Round Table.

There are only 3 of each type of equipment in the game, so you'd think that the best way to play this would be with 4 players to increase the possibility of players fighting the dragon without a full set. Unfortunately, the game bogs down a bit with a full complement and is actually more enjoyable with 2 or 3.

My eldest son went through a phase where he was creating variants for the game - using the pieces to make alternate pathways & shortcuts - which was a lot of fun to play with him.

#96: So ein Käse

So ein Käse

• designer: Peter Neugebauer
• publisher: Goldsieber
• date: 2003
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/5.7
• age: 5+
• # of players: 2-4
• print status: in print?
• cost: $24.95 (USA), EUR 12,95 (about $19.50)

I didn't classify this game of mice chasing cheese (this won't be the last time this theme crops up here on the list - it certainly wasn't the first!) as a memory game, though there is a memory element to it. It's really a game of collecting victory points by moving efficiently around the board.

You're working your way across the kitchen, picking up cheese & sausage & various other goodies - the board is laid out in a (primarily) hexagonal grid (though that's disguised as point-to-point movement). Players roll the dice & then take their move - but there are (thankfully) a trio of twists:

1. A few of the tokens are cat tokens - which allow you to scatter all of the mice back to the corners... and you get to choose who goes to which corner.
2. The die has two special symbols on it - a padlock, which allows you to "lock" one of your items so it can't be taken, and a hand, which allows you to take another players' item & return it to the board. (In a nice touch, you can simply refuse either of these special powers & roll again.)
3. Mice block other mice... meaning you can be boxed in and/or cut off from good hunting areas.

When less than 3 tokens remain on the board, the mice return to their corners & count their stuff.

While it will work with 2 players, the game really shines with 3 or 4 players.

#97: Flying Carpet

Flying Carpet (Der Fliegende Teppich)

• designer: Kurt Feyerabend & Elke Flogaus
• publisher: Ravensburger
• date: 1987
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: 2527/5.9
• age: 12+
• # of players: 3-6
• print status: OOP
• cost: EUR 24,99 (about $35)

This was one of the earliest "eurogames" I purchased - in the late 1980's, Ravensburger published a number of great games in English and sold them through Discovery Toys (a MLM organization for toys) and upscale yuppified "educational" toy stores. It barely makes this list because of the "ages 12+" recommendation on the box - but I've played this with kids as young as 6, so I included it.

Granted, your average 6 year old has a hard time figuring out all the crazy things that can happen when they play a particular card - but one of the very smart ideas in the game is the mutable nature of the board. Through a variety of cloud & building pieces, you can design a raceway for the flying carpets that's easy enough for a 6 year old to navigate - or difficult enough to frustrate even the most hardened Formula De driver.

Movement is granted through cards that have both a vertical & horizontal dimension. These allow you to go under or over obstacles while attempting to cut off your opponents. There are some chance spaces (roll a die & generate a random effect) and wind tokens to help you modify your cards in small increments. And don't forget: the higher you go, the faster the prevailing winds!

The artwork is gorgeous - it looks like a childrens storybook based on 1001 Arabian Nights. The gameplay is fun, if a bit frustrating when using lots of obstacles.

I need to take this one to game night next week... it's great for kids & good enough to work as a filler game with a bunch of gamers.

#98: Bis Bald im Wald

Bis Bald im Wald

• designer: Peter Neugebauer
• publisher: Goldsieber
• date: 2004
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/5.3
• age: 7+
• # of players: 2-4
• print status: OOP
• cost: EUR 10,99 (about $16)

There are a lot (21+!) of memory games on the Kid Games 100... this is the first of those - and quite possibly the most difficult. There's only 25 pieces in the forest (aka playing grid)... but the need to move your deer & remember multiple tiles in order to complete tasks makes this one a real brain-burner.

On your turn, you move your "Bambi" (even now, Disney lawyers are trying to figure out if the air quotes keep them from owning this blog) from intersection to intersection, turning over one tile at each stop. You're trying to complete a task of finding two or three animals within five moves - but if you turn over an animal that's not on the card, your turn is over. There are trees (which are neutral), owls (who let you peek at another tile) and foxes (who rearrange the row & column their in when they're part of a completed task!)

The rearranging of the tiles & the necessity of avoiding the other players (you can't land on an intersection someone else is on) takes a simple memory game & turns it into a game which threatens to blow the synapses of unsuspecting adults.

My almost 7 year old is just getting old enough to try this one - we'll see how it goes.

Stuff I Caught Out Of The Corner of My Virtual Eye

Follow these links at your own risk...

• Charlie Peacock on the future of "Christian Music" in CCM Magazine

Christian music’s alliances with mainstream entertainment corporations will all prove eternally less than successful, since they all bet first on the power of the market to deliver results and not the hand of God—something God has never been fond of. (See Bible for evidence.)

I don't like everything he says... but I'm not telling you I think he's wrong.

• #268. Slow dancing with temptation. (The dump, throwing up and your dad.) from the Stuff Christians Like blog

I think about Carsten sometimes when I face temptation. He had a visceral, full body, completely committed response to things he thought were gross. It wasn’t soft, it wasn’t casual. It was big and loud and final. His entire life stopped momentarily while he addressed an issue with every fiber of his being. And that reaction doesn’t feel like how I respond when I’m tempted by something.

Strong stuff - but as usual, he's on target (and manages to get in a couple of great gross-out stories at the same time.)

• Tall Skinny Kiwi on Contextualization - Context: Does It Matter?, Context [part 2]: Between Mindlessness & Recklessness, and Context [part 3]: Between Absolutism & Relativism

I am writing from an internet cafe in the downtown city of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. All the men around me are in turbans and are smoking Sheeshas. I have just drunken a long fruit drink as I contemplated what would happen if I just stood up and starting sharing about Christ without any regard to context. How would I communicate it? What have they heard already? If they decided to submit to Isa and follow him, would they still remove their shoes to pray or wear them like the westerners? Could they call him "Isa" as in the Quran, or should they use the English name "Jesus" and would he then be a blue-eyed blond-haired Jesus? Much to think about. Carelessness kills.

As usual, Andrew manages to drag important stuff into the light without killing it or trying to kill those who disagree with him. Andrew's superpower: patience.

• A barely-there, skinny 19-point margin from the GetReligion blog

Yes, you read that right. In the Los Angeles Times newsroom, 19 percentage points constitute slim, narrow, bare majorities. Gosh, I wonder how the story would be played if the opposite results were found. I know, as Barbie says, that math is hard. But this is truly inexcusable and the Times’ cheerleading in support of same-sex marriage is anything but journalism.

Believe what you want about same-sex marriage - but editorial comment belongs on the op/ed page. (BTW, regardless of your religious background, you ought to be reading GetReligion.org, which focuses on news coverage - or the lack thereof - of religion.)

Thank You, Anonymous Benefactor!

This just showed up in the mail today... wow! Thank you, kind person!

Playtesting 101

So, somebody has asked you to playtest their board game... is this a honor of the highest order or a clear clue to what a creampuff/pushover/Weeble you are?

I guess I fall into the "creampuff" category, as I've done a decent amount of playtesting & have volunteered to do more.

Why, you ask? Well, I think there's probably a healthy dose of "I got to play it first" along with the whole "I helped build that" thing that happens when you walk into a game store & see something you had a hand in making better. In most cases, I playtest for friends - people I genuinely like & respect as designers - and so there's an element of "get by with a little help from my friends" vibe going on as well. (Yes, everyone may now spend the rest of the day humming various selections from "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" - but you get negative victory points for using any cover versions from the late 70's movie except Earth Wind & Fire's cover of "Gotta Get You Into My Life".)

I've been involved in a three different types of playtesting:

• the "let's see if this will work" phase

If you don't like the game designer, avoid this at all costs. This is the moment where their precious baby - the design they've dreamed about & sketched & worked the math & thought about while they were in standing in the shower (hey, some of my best sermon illustrations happen in there!) - is pushed from the protective nest of the designers' bosom to see if it will fly - or drop like a stone. Most of the time, these experiments end in a giant thud & usually without a satisfactory conclusion to the game. Personal examples: this was the stage at which I first playtested Ty Doud's Victory & Honor (which was a lot of fun) and with some other games (which weren't).

• the "try to break the game" phase

Most of the playtesting I've done in the last 2-3 years falls into this category... this is where the rules & components of the game are pretty well-established and your job is to find the holes through blind playtesting.

For the uninitiated, "blind playtesting" is where the designer gives or sends you a copy of the prototype & the rules and lets you try to learn the game on your own. It is, btw, an ESSENTIAL part of good game design that is too often neglected. (Hint: when many of the playtesters have the same last name as the designer and/or publisher, it probably hasn't been blind playtested.)

We had a lot of fun sending Ray Mulford bizarre e-mails about his (as yet unpublished) Everybody Limbo when we discovered that our playing style was completely different than his original playtest group. (It, btw, is a neat card game - I wish someone would pick it up.)

• the "tweak the little things" phase

I like this stage - whether it's helping test special powers for Frank Branham's Battle Beyond Space (SOMEONE PUBLISH THIS ALREADY!) or checking game balance for Joe's Scream Machine, it's nice to play nearly finished games. (I also got to do a bit of this for Hasbro, but if I tell you what games, they'll come to my house & burn it to the ground... at least I _think_ that's what the NDA that I signed said. It may be worse than that.)

As a final note, I will say that having your name printed in the rules is really cool. What's humorous is that while I've tested a number of games for Frank Branham, the only published game of his that has my name in the credits is Dia de los Muertos, which I only played once and that VERY late in the development. OTOH, I did a lot more work & play on the "Evil Geniuses" prototype (which became Nodwick: The Card Game) and my name's not anywhere on that one. I figure we can call it even.

#99: Max MauseSchreck

Max MauseSchreck (Cat & Mouse)

• designer: uncredited
• publisher: Ravensburger
• date: 2001
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: not ranked/5.6
• age: 4+
• # of players: 2-4
• print status: in print
• cost: $19.99

Yep, that's a big honkin' block of Swiss cheese sitting in the middle of your gaming table... and there are hidden passageways that you access through one of the holes in the top of the block. Pretty cool, eh?

Beyond that, there's not much to Cat & Mouse (which I know by the German name, Max MauseSchreck). To quote Bob the Tomato: "You roll your dice, you move your mice. Nobody gets hurt." (Actually, Bob is talking about Mousetrap, which will NOT appear on this list, but the quote applies here.) The various spaces direct you to take cheese pieces, lose cheese pieces, climb one of the ladders & jump into the cheese, or relocate Max (the cat).

Whenever Max ends his turn on the same space as a player, he takes away a piece of cheese - and Max moves after every players turn! (Avoiding Max is pretty much the key to winning the game.) Once a player gathers five pieces (which make a cheese wheel), they win the game.

Why in the world would I include such a simple roll'n'move on a list like this? Well, much like the aforementioned Balloon Lagoon, it's fun. It's reasonably short (with 2 or 3 players - with 4 it can drag just a bit) and kids love to play it.

My 3 year old can play this one with a bit of help, so it makes a good bridge game between siblings of different ages.

#100: Balloon Lagoon

Balloon Lagoon

• designer: Forrest-Pruzan Creative
• publisher: Cranium
• date: 2004
• BoardGameGeek rank/rating: 3833/5.3
• age: 5+
• # of players: 1-4
• print status: in print
• cost: $19.99 (often goes on sale at Target & Toys'R'Us)

And so the Kid Games 100 begins... with, oddly enough, a company that started out by producing one of the most overrated trivia games ever made - Cranium. (This is me, shuddering at the thought of having to play again.) But this is not about my hatred of Cranium, it's about my love of the games for kids they've released.

Balloon Lagoon is not going to knock your socks off - it doesn't contain any brilliant new mechanics or clever scoring systems. What it does contain is a whole lot of fun in a well-built package that entertains the heck out of kids.

Balloon Lagoon is essentially 4 carnival games with an aquatic amusement park theme:

• a frog-flicking dexterity game
• a word-creating puzzle using a fishing pole & magnetic letters
• a pattern recognition game using a 4 spinner machine
• and a game where you roll 6 dice attempting to get four of a kind

All of these games are timed by a music box/spinner in the shape of a carousel at the center of the board. (Adults: you will grow to hate the music. I promise.) However many elements of a game you finish (each game has a maximum of 4) is the number of balloon markers you get to stick into your vehicle - fill your vehicle & win. That's it.

The games were well-chosen... a smart 5 year old can play them at nearly the same skill level as the average adult, making this one a lot of fun for adults & kids together. As well, Cranium does their usual stellar job of creating a box for the game (alright, Jam Pack Jam is an exception to this rule) and all of the pieces fit snugly into place between games.

My boys go in waves (yes, inadvertent aquatic metaphor) about playing this one - it stays in the closet for 4-6 weeks & then comes out on a regular basis for 2-3 weeks. My oldest (who is almost 7) will occasionally pull it out & play with it on his own... so it has a pretty high "toy factor" as well as being an enjoyable game.