The Disappointment Wing, Part One
The Keeper has been meaning to open this wing for years and kept finding reasons not to. The material was never thin — the archive has never wanted for grievance — but a room full of it sours the air in the rooms to either side. So the door stayed shut, the crates stacked along the corridor, and the Keeper passed them nightly with the studied indifference of a bird that has decided a thing is furniture.
Two panels are now hung, which is fewer than intended. The corridor is merely less crowded than it was.
What keeps this wing from being a complaints ledger is the archivist’s insistence on a distinction: a thing that failed is not the same as a thing that disappointed. The second requires that something first be wanted. Every exhibit here was wanted — anticipated, listed, backed, unwrapped with real gladness — and then found wanting in one particular, nameable place. That place is almost never the miniatures.
The earliest panel is in black and white, which the archivist announces at the outset is deliberate and not a fault of the equipment. It is the only exhibit in the room disappointed by no game at all. The Keeper hung it first anyway, because the rest of the wall runs downhill from it: a hobby in which the wanting is cultivated rather more carefully than the having, and in which the man who says you do not have to buy this one is the man who gets shouted at for saying it.
Five older panels hang among the new, as the practice is here, and the Keeper declines to mark which is which. Between them they cover a box that names its monsters and never says where one might read about them, an archer killed at considerable range by a swordsman, and a game praised ten separate times and sold regardless. The Keeper, which has never bought anything and has therefore never been disappointed by a purchase, finds the arrangement instructive and files the wing under appetite.
The remaining crates stay on the landing. There will be a second hanging.
Exhibit Catalogue — earliest first:
- Shadows of Kickstarter - an introspective look at this hobby… — he told a backer they needn’t pledge, and the crowd turned on him for it.
- Skull Tales Full Sail - Take a look at the game, and the disaster of a rule book — ten pages of fan errata, and he keeps finding errors the errata missed.
- A Failing of the Cthulhu Mythos Board Games — the box names Wilbur Whateley and never once says where to read him.
- Massive Darkness 2 - What am I doing wrong? — a sword-armed mob killing his archer several zones away, armour notwithstanding.
- 10 Things I love about Stars of Akarios: A Great Game that’s Not for Me — ten things he loves, and a campaign length that sells the box anyway.
- Dungeons of Draggmar - Amazing Art, and Initial Frustrations — magnificent art, no weapons drawn, and neoprene that refuses to lie flat.
- Some Things I Like about 5 Games I Don’t Like — the only board game he has ever rage-quit, and sold that same afternoon.
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– The Keeper
Has never been disappointed by anything, having taken the elementary precaution of expecting nothing.