squircular reasoning

carcassonne is famously an excellent game for plural systems to play together, because of its fairly simple rules and no hidden information. lots of plural systems have independently discovered this fact. but we wanna share this cool decktet game that we think is kind of even better for this use case in some ways in some ways

you have to make a small modification because the rules as written say to play with each player having a hidden hand of three cards but that's easy you just play it like carcassonne normally, drawing cards from the deck and playing them immediately

otherwise it's like an extremely stripped down simplified carcassonne
we think it has a few benefits:

• lessr free space required, it's just a 6x6 grid of (decktet) playing cards
• games are much shorter in length so you don't get as exhausted or board
• scoring is way simpler
• 2somewhat less of a focus on meta territorial struggles, because control over districts is just determined by who has a higher ranked tokened card and not total number of tokens controlling the district (each player only gets four tokens total anyways)
• the simplified rules make it a little bit less cognitively exhausting to play. the one time we played carcassonne with headmates in the past it was like, we got a headache from thinking back and forth so much
• solitaire version you could play cooperatively if you don't like the competition i suppose
• has furries on the cards
• "the moon district" it sounds cool to talk about

a thing that's frusturating is that we live our lives in first person, experiencing the world as a fluctuating succession of sensory experiences, emotions, thoughts, and senses of selves. it is a complex process of internality that makes us so often feel like we just have no strong sense of identity or self, makes us feel like we have no name, like we could never have "a name". we are so easily tumbled into this sense of self or that sense of self, very different self-conceptualizations, by external stimulii. we are to a large degree the things outside of us.

but this way of existing is seemingly incompatible with online life. online life is lived in the third person. you are shown your messages at all times with a name and a picture next to them. there is a jarring feeling when it doesn't match with how i feel in a moment

at all times online life demands to know:

who are you?

i don't know

i feel bad for all my friends in real life too because i cant provide a satisfactoy way for them to refer to me, they have sympathetic pain with the way i almost wince when a name that was fine days ago but now confuses me is used for me.

interesting how much for us the process of worldbuilding is like

• gathering little seed threads
• cultivating and growing them into a model, a thoughtform
• asking this thoughtform, this increasingly-coherent model of a world, questions, and receiving answers, or when there's not an answer, helping it develop one
• having flashes of inspiration that i internally perceive as coming "from" that world, visions from another place that truly exists, just not on this reality.

worldbuilding becomes a nonverbal conversation with something that is not exactly me, but lives in, or perhaps, merely contacts this world through, my mind

this is especially in the context of me already kind of viewing artistic creation as a process of helping what is already there express itself, rather than me unilaterally Making something, in a way that is kind of heavily influenced by and honestly core to my view that the world is alive, that everying is Aware and Knowing, in their own way. reaching out and channeling the spirits of songs or stories, treating the imagination as just as real as the material world, a place i can go to, if i want.