Hadrian’s Wall: I Was Surrounded By Surprisingly Well-Behaved Picts
This is an excerpt from the script-in-progress for Episode 90, slated to publish by mid-April. Latest episodes here.
Having already achieved my solo-play laurels on the lowest difficulty level of Hadrian’s Wall, I graduated myself to medium difficulty. I wish I could tell you the score, friends. I tried to play it in the lobby of a local hotel for a change of scenery, the magic circle was compromised and I don't remember.
At 55, I don’t feel like I can afford to wait for the right companion to do all the stuff I want to do. I can see death’s outriders chucking tasseled spears into the ground the next ridge over. Last year I was in Colorado Springs on Valentine’s Day, craving the chicken makhani from Little Nepal. They sat me by myself at a two-top in the middle of the room, encircled by booths full of couples. I didn’t give a shit. I wanted chicken makhani. Chicken makhani is real and Valentine's Day is made up.
Breaking out a solo game in a public place is a similar proposition; you look queasily ungrouped. Living in a former coal mining town of about 100 souls after COVID, a divorce and a reckoning with myself as an obsolete economic unit has warped me socially, but compensated me with an inner life that’s like a Mandelbrot set into which I slow-motion plummet day after day. Hauling artifacts from this mesmerizing descent into the middle of a bar or restaurant rarely translates. The ratio of pieces to people denotes some kind of illness.
My experience reminds me of the stories I hear on the Reddit solo boardgaming sub: Folks look at you funny when you tell them you mostly play solo. Even funnier when you do it. A great many of these Redditors are solo players by necessity, having bought a stack of games but finding no corresponding stack of people. These kids play privately and share snapshots of crowded folding tables in lamplight for those who understand.
When the scout group of otherworlders arrives in the hotel lobby — a wiry dad with piercing cult leader eyes and two energetic women his age trailing the first of their young charges — the tower of Domino's Pizza boxes soon follows. Enough to placate an office park. I’m about to be swarmed left, center and right.
I don't have sufficient cohorts in place, so I parley. In the game, you can partially mitigate your lack of forward defensive forces by sending citizen meeples to the care of the patricians, who will reward you with this and that. I send these parents my remaining Oreo mini-cupcakes; the rest had gone to the desk girls who keep me in the latest WiFi passwords. They are courteous enough. We will coexist in the room.
Within minutes more kids materialize to envelop every edge of the two big table islands, me retaining a quadrant on one of them. I can’t remember the strategy I wanted to do. I go fast. Drive the fort on the left sheet, don’t snag on an unbuilt granary, that’s the spine, that’s one of the breakthroughs I manage to recall. The kids are mostly preteens, with a few teenagers there as shepherd dogs. Their good behavior skirts the eerie. There are no raised voices. I hear talk only of skiing and church.
I have been in similar situations where somebody will walk by my table and want to know what’s going on. I tend to overexplain, pitch like I’m manning a demo table at a con. Not today. Not with this crew, even when hailed.
“What are you playing, sir?” I hear from across the table. I pretend not to hear her until she switches it up, tacking the honorific onto the front end: “Sir, what are you playing?” I look across a tundra of table at a short-haired girl of about ten, flanked by the same. She looks a dead ringer for one of the moms chatting at the other group of tables.
“Hadrian’s Wall,” I say, picking up the box and pointing at the cover. Then I go back to playing. By the time I rack up a mediocre score that reflects the rushed thinking, the room’s emptied out again except for the parents, who linger to laugh about their teen-year courtships, ‘80s playlists and church.