The Low Door Again
The Keeper had rather thought the unhurried stacks were finished. One crate came through some weeks back, opened without complaint, near enough filed itself, and the Keeper wrote a note to the effect that ease is its own kind of wealth and considered the matter closed.
A second crate has arrived. Same shelf. Same low door. No seals, no rope, no oilcloth gone stiff with salt — just a lid that lifts, which by now the Keeper recognises as a signature rather than a coincidence.
This is Nearly Effortless Fun, Part Two, and what strikes the Keeper on unpacking is how little these seven exhibits have in common on the surface and how completely they agree underneath. There is a dungeon that lives inside a paperback. There is a village assembled by telephone. There is a game with no box at all — the Keeper checked twice, then checked the shipping label, which turned out to be the box. There is a father and a daughter, there are four servants of a wizard raising somebody else’s child, and there is, improbably, a bus timetable for an English seaside town.
Nothing here asks much at the door. That is the entire argument. The archivist has been making it for years, with the patience of a man who suspects nobody is listening: that the weight of a box and the size of the adventure inside it are unrelated quantities, and that anyone who believes otherwise has simply never been handed a vinyl poster and a bag of counters and told to go and have a wonderful afternoon.
The Keeper notes, with the mild satisfaction of a creature who files things for a living, that two of these exhibits reappear years later on the archivist’s own list of the five most effortlessly fun games he owns. He did not know that when he first shelved them. He merely liked them and said so, and was corroborated by his own later self — the most reliable witness this building has ever managed to produce.
The catalogue runs earliest to latest, the deeper low-friction stacks folded in among the new arrivals. The Keeper declines, as ever, to say which panels went up this morning.
Exhibit Catalogue
- Adventure Games: Discover the Story: The Dungeon: The Review — the worst title in board gaming, attached to a dungeon that lives inside a paperback.
- Bag of Dungeon - The Review — paper-doll item chits drawn from a bag; his favourite touch in any small box.
- Roll Player Adventures - Effortless Fun — the video that coined the phrase; five minutes from boxed to playing.
- Destinies - App-based Adventure Time! — he used a sword wrongly on purpose, and the app allowed it.
- A Look at 7 Moons: Heroes of Dragon Reach — sacrifice the horse to train the dragon, then pray the dragon stays.
- Wayward - An Ultimate Indie Game and the Ultimate Beer & Pretzel Dungeon / City crawl — no box, a vinyl poster, and a magnetised wand he adores at 47.
- Familiar Tales - A delightful fantasy adventure — a crying baby can alert the guards, and the throne remembers everything.
- CoraQuest - an adorable, family-weight dungeon crawl with a lot of charm — a timer that never kills you, only makes standing still expensive.
- BN1 - An Adventure Game / City Crawl set in the modern city of Brighton — Brighton by bus pass, with Disco Pete and Fatboy Slim in the encounter deck.
- Lands of Galzyr: A Wonder of Design and Adventure — for everyone who poured a thousand hours into Skyrim and never finished the main quest.
- Quests over Coffee - Have Coffee, Will Quest — ten quests, ten minutes, a mimic toilet, and Samus available for hire.
- Five (Nearly) Effortlessly Fun Games — the list itself, vindicating two exhibits above years after their first shelving.
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– The Keeper
Observes that every heavy crate in this building arrived promising to be the last word on something, while the light ones merely turned up, lifted their lids, and were still being played with years later. The Keeper has stopped being surprised, though it does keep a tally.