Okay…I admit it. My normally repressed obsessive compulsive tendencies are periodically but profoundly plucked from their comfy spot and thrust into the full sunlight by my gaming hobby. However, my raw exposed OCD is hardly a rarity in the fringe-dwelling, eccentric, Eurogamer demographic. Yesterday I received my new copy of Lexio and I had the tiles spread out on my dining room table in all their glory and when I went to put them back in the extremely well designed box insert (a rarity mind you), I felt compelled to sort the tiles by suits (sun, moon, star, cloud).
To take it a step further I simply had to arrange them in numeric order so that the smaller numbered tiles were on the bottom running left to right (1,3,4,5,6,7,8) followed by a second layer of tiles (9,10,11,12,13,14,15). The ‘2’ tile is placed separatedly in its own slot where the special artwork can be displayed next to its companion ‘2’ tiles in the other suits. If that wasn’t enough I had placed the lower numbered tiles on the bottom to hide the fact that the ‘2’ was missing from the order.The pièce de résistance came when I made sure that the ‘2’ tiles and the field tiles were arranged within the insert in suit order as well: sun > moon > star > cloud.
Tonight when Lisa and I played a sample hand and I packed away the game I felt I needed to do it again and midway through the process I realized I’d substituted a 9 tile in the place of a 6 tile and it had been buried making it difficult to swap out. But, for my own good…I left it that way. But I must admit, the box is sitting here by my foot and that poor little tile is in there without his rightful partners. It’s in there crying out to me that it’s out of place…
In thinking about it, I own several games that trigger my OCD tendencies:
Himalaya – At game end, everyone must place their yak, stupas, delegates, and programming disks in a separate baggie.
Reef Encounter – I just got this game and the packing bugs me. I have to dismantle the parrotfish each time and the game came with several baggies but I don’t know quite how they expect me to use them. I feel like I’m being inefficient because I don’t think I need all of them. Did they figure out a really cool but obtuse way to pack the game that I’m just not seeing?
Memoir ’44 – The opposing forces cannot mingle in the box because they’ll fight when I’m not looking! Duh!
Do you have any games that feature aspects of packaging or gameplay that cause an itch on your psyche?