Someday I will have a huge game room with a beautiful Geek Chic game table (maybe two, a big one and a little one) and  crokinole board and a carrom board and one of those Geek Chic Codex things and shelves and shelves of games and game-related art and IT WILL BE GLORIOUS.

I caught a few other 'new to the scene' comments.  I won't tell their business/marketing professors :)

My favorite portion of the interviews was when the Carrom guy was talking about the French player who has studied with all the masters. He went to India and studied with this guy, then he went here to study with this other guy…

It sounded like the start of a martial arts movie.  Carrom, starring David Carradine and directed by Ang Lee. The story of a young French man, determined to avenge his father’s humiliation via world Carrom domination.

Alternate names: 16mm;  6 rebounds

I know; I know. I edited and reedited that and almost withdrew it completely and reedited the comment to say something innocuous like "have a nice vacation". First, because I know that you can't answer for your guests' opinions (or claims to zombie innovation for that matter) and secondly because I really wouldn't want to be responsible for kicking off the sort of snipefest that can too often happen with this sort of subject. In the end I couldn't do it because it sounded like the very kind of thinking and dialogue your guest was hoping his game would stimulate. I hope it does; as I said 1960 actually increased my understanding of history since so much of what we still live with today started with that election. If Jolly Roger delivers on that promise I might just have to give him that milk money he asked for. (Even if he is a Republican, grin.)

So he didn't tell ya what that Launius game was off mike did he?

…sigh… maybe I should have gone with the “happy vacation” message. No bias is a very tricky to pull off- I certainly can’t do it- that was again the remarkable thing about 1960: The Making Of The President. At its time of release, it was coincidentally a hot topic all over again. Many on the right were responding to criticism of the 2000 election by angrily suggesting that Kennedy’s win had been less than totally aboveboard. Many on the left were pointing to Nixon’s loose view of legal responsibility as a parallel to the Bush tactics. And yet I think a representative from either side could sit down at the table and feel that their side was fairly treated by the game’s history lesson. That’s one of the beautiful things about really good table games; they provide a civilized framework for conflict. We would for example apparently differ wildly about the late Mr. Reagan- there’s a reason my friend at the time had a bumper sticker reading “Ronald Reagan hates me” and there’s a whole raft of reason s why every time Mr. Obama felt it necessary to invoke Mr. Reagan on the campaign trail my skin crawled a little. But like I said I really don’t want to be responsible for infecting the Spiel with its own version of the RSP virus.

Because you apparently have your reasons for thinking him a heckuva guy. And in our polarized AM Talk Radio culture that means one of us is supposed to pick the black hat while the other picks the white hat and then we scream at each other for a while. Trust me, looking askance at extremists claiming to be on your side happens on all sides of the political fence.  Games might give us the opportunity to do more than that. Much as a formal debate provides rules for governing argument, a game could give us the framework to actually learn from each other. Playing as Nixon in 1960, for example, really gave me a deeper understanding of where he came from even if it didn’t leave me much more sympathetic about where he ended up.

As far as the way history gets massaged, forgive me for suggesting Will Bunch’s recent book “Tear Down This Myth” which has an interesting take on how Reagan’s mantle has been shaped to fit by people for their own political ends, while being more evenhanded with the actual man than I probably could have managed. Undeniably, to be fair, the same process also happened with Kennedy at least until Dan Quayle got so memorably shot down in debate making that pose a little less useful.