Game Night Is a Thing!

I finally got over my jitters, hesitation, and general nervousness about taking the Worku game out into the wild and brought it to Crooked Goat, my local watering hole here in Petaluma.

I put the word out to the local worki. It happened to be a busy night for everyone, so the player pool was limited—but auntie jj showed up, and we played!

A few rounds of Worku happened between beers, tater tots, and a fish sandwich, and you know what?

It was fun! You can see the game in the poems page right here!

And some pretty good Worku came out of it. In one round, auntie jj took the single restraint word CLEAR and turned it into a storm at sea:

CLEAR the decks, big wave
the sea groans and swells, wind blows
sailors pray, no words

Another round gave us MARCH and TIRED. Mine went somewhere quieter:

Quick MARCH through this life
honor bugle’s early call —
pray by TIRED grave

Then the restraint die gave us six words: SPEAK, SMILE, SLICK, LIGHT, ALONG, AGAIN.

Six restraint words. Seventeen syllables. Good luck!

Somehow, we both got poems out of it.

That’s part of what I’m interested in watching as we play more: what happens when the game throws something easy at us, something difficult, or something that initially looks impossible.

We played using the rules as they currently stand, and I’m keeping notes as we go. The goal is to keep tinkering until the game feels like what I want Worku to be: fun, creative, social, and just competitive enough to keep things moving without making winning the point.

I did not do a particularly good job of keeping track of this first game. What I’ve posted over in Poems is the best reconstruction I could make from my rather messy notes. Lesson learned. Future Game Night scorekeeping will improve!

But the important thing is:

Game Night is a thing!

I’ll be posting more Game Night dates and invitations here in the Weblog and on Instagram and Facebook.

Until then—

worku every day!