When we made Takeout, I wanted to share my personal experience with players. It’s an autobiographical game, using game mechanics to tell my story and my feelings.
I wanted to share the frustrating mystery of ordering in foreign language and the joy of finally getting a good meal. The face-down draw deck represents my understanding that there was something good in the kitchen, but not being able to choose what I was getting. The lack of Cold cards represents, well, the lack of cold drinks, due to the traditional Chinese belief that cold drinks are unhealthy. Even my original game title, Chi Fan Le Ma?, sums up the value of good food in Chinese life.
Last weekend, we took our games to Ithacon. Just between us, Internet, I almost backed out of the show because I felt terribly overextended. Our landlord is selling, so we have a surprise move coming up, which means every minute I’m not teaching, I’m apartment hunting, Harold is changing jobs, and also adulting is unpleasantly time-consuming in general. And when we finally left for Ithacon, we got caught in a freak March snowstorm in the upstate mountains, so I quoted that road to Ithaka poem to Harold as we pulled into a highway motel and hoped that we could make the rest of the drive in the morning. (Being married to me is an unending delight.)
But I’m glad we made it, because I had a really wonderful time sharing Takeout with new players. We also demoed our Captain Action card game and our newest project, a beta release of a vintage fortune-telling game, but while I’m quite proud of our other projects, they just aren’t as personal as Takeout.
With Takeout, I’m sharing more of myself and my own experiences with new players. It can be a bit emotional to share my game, submit it to a festival, or even talk too much about it, because on some level, it really is my personal story, in a deck of cards. So I really loved seeing new friend groups figure out the food-stealing as they teased each other about their real-life chopstick skills or yoinked a favorite dish. The Ithaca College kids were so friendly and receptive, and I just felt so lucky to be there. Ithacon was great in general, the student organizers and volunteers killed it. We’ve been to professional conventions that didn’t run nearly as smoothly. But my main memory was just the warm feeling of watching friends steal each others’ dishes and draw new cards, hoping they got something delicious.
