Over the years, I’ve tried a lot of stuff outside my comfort zone.
It’s one of the great parts of this job. But last week’s trip to the library wasn’t one of those times. At least that’s what I thought.
I felt confident going into my participation in the monthly Castaway Challenge at the Concord Public Library. Turns out, I was a little too confident for my own good.
It’s amazing how something that seems so easy can turn out to be a lot harder than you think. Whenever I go out on a limb and try new things, I want to be successful. There’s no fun in writing about a failure. Trust me, I’ve done it more times then I’d care to remember.
So I thought, what better way than to test your skills against a group of kids. And the library is the perfect place for it. I had already conquered the local Legos scene, building an amazing gingerbread house without the gingerbread, and it was time to move on.
The monthly calendar listing for the Castaway Challenge had always intrigued me. Participants are charged with using items that nobody wants (hence the castaway name) to create an object based on a theme. For January, those who accepted the challenge had one hour to invent a game.
Now to be perfectly honest, I knew about the theme a few days prior to Thursday’s gathering. Pam Stauffacher, the children’s services and branch manager at the library, gave me the inside track when we talked at the beginning of last week. In hindsight, maybe she felt bad for me.
Because looking back, I should have used that knowledge to my advantage. I never put any thought into what I wanted to create. Sure it was nice to know the theme ahead of time, but without a list of available materials, there wasn’t a sense of urgency on my part to plan ahead. Plus, I’m a pretty busy guy with a full social calendar, if you must know.
And with only one hour to develop and invent a game, my inability to think ahead came back to haunt me. There were so many great materials to chose from, including tape, cardboard, bottle caps and construction paper, and my counterparts had little trouble ping right in. The same cannot be said for this guy. Before I knew it, my time had dwindled to 45 minutes and I had yet to start.
So I just went for it. I grabbed five rolls of colored tape and a piece of cardboard. My first objective – create a game board. I figured there would be plenty of time to come up with a name and rules (which turned out to be false). I just needed something to show for my time. So I took the tape and started placing pieces around the edge in a random fashion. As I continued to put the tape pieces around the edge, the idea came to me. Instead of having just a single loop of colorfulness around the outside of the cardboard, why not have it wind to the middle.
Once the game board was complete, there was not a lot of time left. So I scrambled to find game pieces. The best I could come up with was five tiny foam cutouts of vehicles. Not my first choice, but it was the only thing that loosely matched my game board colors and I had very little time to waste.
Add a paper die, which I cut out, glued together and placed a different color tape to each side, and all the pieces were there for the game that is now known as – Color Chaos.
The name fits well, since there are no rules and if anyone tried to play it, the end result would likely be utter chaos. But trust me, someday there will be a set of rules. Just you wait.
This process gave me a new appreciation for the board game companies of the world. It’s not all that easy to develop a game that people want to play. Especially when you have just one hour.
But believe me, the world will soon know what it’s like to play Color Chaos. You just have to be patient.
