It is quite easy, in this time when the tremendous dragon overlords control huge swaths of the continental map and important factions of both the dwarf and elf communities have chosen to isolate themselves completely from the world at large, to forget that there are many positive emotions, behaviors, and pastimes shared by all the mortal races. War seems to loom on the horizon of lands that have known too little peace in the past century, yet in the cities and on the farms, in the sylvan forests and throughout the caverns carved into the living rock, life, love, and happiness keep the people's spirits high. It is instructive, from a scholarly point of view, to examine what distractions the people of Ansalon use to maintain their sense of hope and joy. Some insight may be gleaned by the nature of the games and pastimes with which we choose to brighten the sometimes oppressively bleak panorama of our lives.

Perhaps I am becoming a touch cantankerous as I grow older—it happens even to the most detached and rational of men—but more and more I find myself romanticizing the past and longing for the way things used to be. [A common—and quite mistaken—feeling. Personally I have never found any nostalgia for the past, save for a longing that my master, Astinus, might once more be seated in his study as I remember him.] One can imagine how disturbing the member of an Order devoted to scrupulously recording the present finds it when reliving thoughts of his past becomes easier and more enjoyable than delving into the problems of today. A day is surely coming when I shall retire from the Aesthetics, and the Great Library of the Ages will be a gentle memory. Perhaps that is what happened to Astinus, and someday he will return to us from his sabbatical, but that seems less and less likely with each passing day.

But what will I do if I leave the Order? I will surely need some distraction or pastime to occupy my days. Best, then, to do a bit of research in preparation for that day. I would hate to have to waste my golden years pursuing the wrong form of entertainment.

The image one most readily associates with the word game is one of children frolicking through fields of tall grass and flowers, laughing and singing on a summer's afternoon. In truth, this is probably the purest definition of "game"—a wholly circumstantial and impromptu pursuit utterly lacking in practical or otherwise useful benefits. It is fun. What's more, it is universal. Children of every race on Krynn all play roughly the same games until such time as their culture deems it appropriate for them to begin training for their future positions within society.

These games, played for sheer exhilaration's sake, often consist of a great deal of running about with none of the participants actually knowing (or caring) what the "rules" are. Children dash about until one bumps into another, and then both squeal with delight and go tearing off in the direction from which they came. As the children get older, though, identifiable rules develop, and the game becomes universally recognizable as Tag. One child is "it" and tries to pass the mantle on to another child by touching or grabbing one of his or her playmates in a prescribed manner. This can be as simple as a tap on the shoulder (as is the case in Abanasinia and Solamnia) or as complicated as having to simultaneously touch the target's head and knee (a bizarre kender variation); as gentle as a Qualinesti child brushing against his or her friend's tunic (direct skin to skin contact is frowned upon) or as rough as a minotaur calf wrestling a playmate to the ground and pinning him or her there for no fewer than twenty seconds.

As Tag loses its interest—generally because some members of the group develop faster than others, giving them an unfair advantage over the others—more team-oriented games come into vogue. These too are usually physical in nature, but they allow the superiority of one child to be balanced by teaming him or her with a less able partner, thus allowing for competitions that are fair and fun for all involved.

Merchants and Bandits remains a popular game of this type. In it, the children split into teams. One team links arms around waists in a long chain ending in a single child holding onto the trunk of a large tree or rock (depending on the terrain in which the children reside). This is the Merchant team, and each of their members represents a shipful of goods. The Bandit team lines up and one at a time run at and leap onto the backs of the first team. If, by their weight alone, they can cause one of the Merchant players to fall to the ground he or she and all the Merchants behind him or her have been stolen from the trade caravan. After all of the Bandits have leaped, the Merchants get one point for each player remaining in their chain (who are said to have "reached Palanthas"). Now the roles are reversed, and the game played again. Whichever team has the most members reach Palanthas is the winner.

Another popular game, particularly during the spring rainy season, is Goblin Stones. In order to play this game, the children need a patch of mud that is dry enough that a stone will remain relatively dry when stepped upon, yet sufficiently wet to make a complete mess. The game is played by setting up a path of stones from one end of the patch to the other and taking turns trying to leap from stone to stone without falling in the mud. Despite the fact that the rules state that staying dry is the only real winning condition, the actual purpose of Goblin Stones is to provide the children with an excuse to roll about in mud, which, I have it on good authority (the daughter of one of my brother Aesthetics), is a great deal of fun and considerably more comfortable than one might guess. [Gully dwarves have been seen trying to play this game, but given their general lack of cleanliness, it is usually impossible to distinguish the winners from the losers.]

As children grow older, adults begrudge them their carefree play time. We see hours spent playing games as wasted time, effort devoted to fruitless endeavors and therefore a waste of resources and potential. However, children still being too delicate and undeveloped, not to mention too mentally undisciplined, to engage in full-time work, we instead teach them games that serve to train them for their future roles in the workplace. At first the children, who often crave more responsibility and respect, take to these games with the same abandon they devoted to their purely fun games. Playing training games makes them feel "grown-up" and like an important contributor to the family's well-being.

Eventually, however, most children realize that these "games" aren't nearly as much fun as their old games, and come to resent this play that is really work in disguise. They rail against the fact that their efforts aren't nearly as appreciated as those of their parents and older siblings. Often they either insist on receiving "real work" to do or refuse to work entirely and go back to the simpler games (or invent new ones in a similar vein). It is curious that training games have a very limited appeal, which fits only in the narrow window of preadolescence. "Fun games" appeal throughout a person's entire life.

Frequently training games take the form of isolated parts of the real work a family does. A child may be tasked with raising one farm animal (a single goat or pig) so that he or she can learn all the various skills required of a farmer or shepherd while still having the fun of raising a pet without risking a large proportion of the family's potential income. In families with strong ties to the Solamnic Knights, children are taught the more easily grasped concepts of the Measure each night before bedtime and then are quizzed on their lessons at dinner. Often the size and quality of the next evening's pudding or dessert will be based on how well the children internalize these core ethos.

Of course, the most popular kind of training game is a tournament. This concept is most commonly associated with duels, jousts, and other knightly activities, but it is just as frequently used to give children an incentive to practice skills that otherwise would be nothing more than repetitive drudgery. Country fairs invariably have competitions among local youngsters to see who is the best at tasks as tedious and far ranging as mending fences, feeding chickens, tending herd animals, and various styles of cooking.

By no means are children the only ones who play games. Sadly, though, while adults will often play games in order to perfect necessary skills or learn new ones, they spare very little time for playing games that have no practical application. In most cultures—kender being the most outstanding exception—adults seem to go out of their way to avoid pure fun for fun's sake. I know that in my life I have always felt that time spent playing games was nothing less than wasted hours that could have been put to some more productive use.

Some training games that adults play are nearly identical to those for children. Tournaments and other contests of physical skill are far and away the most common games played by mature members of most societies. The knightly orders make more frequent use of training games than any other segment of Ansalonian society. Occasionally these contests happen to determine promotion within ranks, but more often than not they are simply exercises to keep the soldiers ready for war. The knights of both Solamnia and Neraka engage in duels and tournaments all year round. Some are contests within a single military unit, while others have contestants drawn from the entire Order, but it is fair to say that not a week goes by when a tournament of one sort or another does not take place.

Many holidays center around a competition of one sort or another, with the prizes often being at least as practical as the game itself. Records tell of several small logging communities in Nordmaar that choose their village headmen by holding a series of tree-felling and log-chopping competitions. The final and most amusing of these contests consists of a strange variation of the traditional log-rolling match. Instead of two or more contestants standing on the same long log, each one has his or her own log cut to be as tall as the contestant. The competitors must each try to stay on his or her log the longest, but the rules encourage attempts to knock other contestants off their logs. The only parameters are that the log rollers may not physically grab one another, and no magic may be used. It is perfectly legal to throw things at opponents, bump one log into another, or create any other physical or psychological distraction.

Of course, not all training games are physical in nature. Many vocations require their practitioners to hone one facet or another of their mental faculties. Their versions of duels and tournaments much more closely resemble what the common folk would call a "game," but they are no less serious. For example, spellcasters of all description still practice a tradition that began hundreds of years ago with the founding of the Orders of High Sorcery—the Spell Off. The simplest comparison is that the Spell Off is like a magical riddle contest. One contestant presents the other with a situation and a collection of magical accouterments. The opponent must come up with an appropriate magical solution to the problem, the more creative the better. Since the Second Cataclysm, the old riddles involving spells and practices of High Sorcery have become even more difficult. Now that new forms of spellcasting have been discovered, new questions centered around sorcery and mysticism have become common in these contests. Still, since both Palin Majere (former head of the Academy of Sorcery) and Goldmoon (First Master of the Citadel of Light) both believe that wisdom lies in remembering the past, the antiquated questions still find their way into institutionally sponsored Spell Offs.

A more amusing form of these mental training is a gnomish game known as "BoomShabamandBigkabang." What exactly this trains the gnomes for, I am unsure, but one suspects that it teaches them how to react when certain warning noises escape from soon-to-malfunction experiments. A scholar who spent time studying the recent unexplainable efficacy of machines produced in Mt. Nevermind also returned with a detailed analysis of the game and its place in the gnome society.

"The game consists," he writes, "of a series of words—all sounding very much like the results of past experiments gone wrong—which the gnomes repeat to one another; each word causes the players to focus on a particular other player. For example, it is clear from only a casual glance that a gnome who says "boom" is passing attention to the gnome he or she is gazing at directly. Very much like an audio game of tag, words are passed back and forth among the players. When one gnome becomes the focus of a word, he or she must quickly pass the attention on to another nearby gnome."

The report goes on to delineate no fewer than eighty-five distinct words that are universally accepted in the game, with new ones being added as it continues. The most unusual thing discovered is that this game apparently began more than seven years ago in the upper laboratories of the mountain. Some time is spent in this report speculating that the game itself was an experiment gone horribly awry that the gnomes had no will to stop. In the intervening years the game passed into every nook and cranny of the main complex and then into the catacombs below. Some thought that it died there, the repetitive noise rousing Pyrothraxis to such anger that he swallowed the players whole. Others believed that two players became separated from their group and were trapped in one of the forgotten laboratories in the bowels of the earth, where they continued to play until someone came along to free them. Just when it seemed as if the Game (as the gnomes have come to call "BoomShabamandBigkabang") was gone forever, a team of gnomes working on unstopping a clogged air duct heard a faint echo from far below.

Kacrunch! it said—the word that passes attention to the first person who hears it. Each of the four gnomes felt that he was the first to hear the word, and each walked away to pass their attention to friend or coworker. The Game was not only back; it had quadrupled in size!

"Now," the report concludes, "anyone who spends any considerable time in Mt. Nevermind will encounter the Game. It begins as a gnome walks into the room, says a nonsense word to her colleague, and the entire room devolves into a maelstrom of quickly hurled inanity. Amazingly enough, the gnomes have become so proficient at playing the Game that it does not interfere with whatever other activities they are engaged in. Sooner or later, one of the players leaves the room and takes the Game with him or her. It seems highly probable, given the fact that the Game has subdivided on at least three other occasions, that this activity will be with the gnomes for as long as the race walks Krynn."

This verbal game of tag uses onomatopoetic words as directional markers for the tag. The simplest version of the game uses only three words:

Boom: Tags the person being directly looked at You cannot Boom someone who just tagged you.

Shabam: Looking directly at the person who tagged you, Shabam tags the person back.

Bigkabang: This allows a player to look at any other player and still make a tag-back on whomever just tagged him.

The game starts with one player yelling, "The name of the game is ‘Boom, Shabam, Bigkabang’." This player is "it" He or she looks directly at another player and says Boom, which gets the game moving by passing "it" The person receiving the tag can look at another player and say Boom, passing "it" on, or say Bigkabang, volleying "it" back to the originator. Or the player can say Shabam, looking directly back at the tagger and return "it" Play continues with "it" being passed around from player to player until one of the following conditions occurs:

• A player fails to respond immediately (within 3-5 seconds) upon being tagged.
• The player who is "it" uses one of the tag words incorrectly.
• A player who is not "it" mistakenly calls out a tag word.

Every infraction earns a player one point That player becomes "it" and restarts the game with, "The name of the game is ‘Boom, Shabam, Bigkabang’." The game continues until one player earns ten points (or until the players get too annoyed to continue).

If the three-word passing seems too easy, players can add new commands, changing the introduction to reflect the new names. For instance, if the Crank command is added, the person starting the game would now yell, "The name of the game is ‘Boom, Shabam, Bigkabang, Crank.’ " New commands should be added in the following order:

Crank: Passes "if to the person on the caller's immediate right, regardless of what direction he or she is looking.

Ratchet: Passes "if to the person on the caller's immediate left, regardless of what direction he or she is looking.

Lube: "If remains with the speaker. Lube is used as a stalling method or to bait another player with eye contact/head movement.

Players may add their own sounds and rules if they wish to complicate matters even further. For instance, "Screech" might be used to send "if back to the person who had "if before the player who tagged you.

If there is a pastime that adults engage in for sheer fun, it is the various etiquette, word, and card distractions that I refer to as "parlor games." At first glance these would seem to be games in the most classic sense. While they are much more complicated than children's games, most do not have any easily identifiable application to one's daily endeavors. However, I believe that even the most innocuous parlor game can be identified as some form of training or experimentation for real-life activities.

Let us begin with games of etiquette. Masquerades, feasts, and other affairs are occasionally celebrated using a theme of social reversal—that is, the lowest-ranked nobles are treated as kings for the evening, while the most powerful aristocrats are treated like barely recognized landowners. This tradition is found in some form among every high society, and it can universally be traced directly back to childhood fantasies wherein one child pretends to be a lord or governor and the others take the roles of courtiers, suitors, and other nobles in the retinue. It allows the children to imagine a better life, as well as practice courtly behavior and fine manners, and it does much the same for the adults. One never knows when the winds of politics (or the whim of a dragon overlord) might topple the social order. It is through diversions like this that every family of noble lineage remains prepared to step into any role left vacant. It also reminds the ruling family of how it feels to be an outcast. Hopefully this also encourages them to be more forgiving and inclusive of these minor nobles lest they find themselves in a similar situation in the coming years.

Word games are more evenly appreciated by the different social classes. Among the noble families of Solamnia, Ergoth, Qualinesti, and even Kern, many a dinner party or family gathering centers around contests and games based on spelling, rhyming, word association, oratory, and even extemporaneous poetry composition. All of these activities can, in some regard, also be considered games of etiquette. They allow the nobles to rehearse speeches they expect to give in comings days—or failed to satisfactorily deliver in the recent past—and to exercise their vocabulary and elocution skills, the meat of any political establishment. At court, success lies in being able to express oneself with style and aplomb, throwing witty offhand comments off like a peacock shedding feathers and always saying exactly what you mean. These are not skills that many people—even those with the bluest blood—come by naturally. They must be honed. Innocent-looking word games are often the difference between ending up a treasured advisor and a disreputable chamberlain.

For folks from the lower rungs of the social ladder, word games can be equally important. In a community where maps are scarce (and often of dubious accuracy), [Hardly surprising, since a large proportion of maps are kender-produced.] and few folk are able to write down directions or instructions, being able to remember vital facts and repeat back long lists of information is a lifesaving skill. Many farmers and menial laborers spend long hours making their children memorize regional geography and the names of the local lords. In the event that they get into trouble away from home, these are the only indicators they can use to inform someone from where they come. Even more critical, simply learning to read can be enough to lift peasants out of poverty and provide them opportunities to improve their lots in life. Every parent recognizes this and does whatever possible to encourage their children to learn their letters and develop a love for reading.

One might imagine there to be no place for military matters in parlor games, but this is not so. There are several games of strategy and tactics, which at their root serve no greater purpose than giving experience to generals and kings without costing the lives of any real soldiers. The most notable of these games is, of course, Khas. [The rules for Khas are given in detail in the Majeres' More Leaves from the Inn of the Last Home.] While some superstitious folk still believe that every game of Khas represents an actual battle taking place elsewhere on Krynn, most nobles realize that it is nothing more than a game of military strategy. The sixteen pieces represent different types of units, and their interaction on the black and white squares of the hexagonal board does bears an uncanny resemblance to a battle viewed from afar. The Great Library has several dozen volumes devoted solely to the exploration of the play of and philosophy behind Khas. The most famous of these is a replica of the diary of Yarns, the Solamnic lord high cleric at the time of the First Cataclysm. His love of the game is legendary, and even four hundred years later his insights into the strategy and philosophy of Khas have never been matched.

Card games have been popular among rich and poor folks for centuries. Hundreds of games with thousands of variations have been catalogued throughout the years. Some can be played with any number; others require specifically four or six players in order to run successfully. Some games are even designed to be played by oneself, but according to my research, all of them serve as some form of historical record or political commentary.

Take, for instance, the game of Istar Falling. In this game players blindly pull cards from one another's hands in an attempt to find matches for the cards they already have. One card, though, has no match—the Kingpriest—and the player left holding that card at the end loses the game. Clearly this is commentary on the final days of Istar's reign, when the forward-thinking nobles distanced themselves from the Kingpriest lest they be drowned in his ocean of corruption.

Since the Second Cataclysm two new games have taken the fancy of card players across the continent. The first is called Dragon Wars, and although its name harkens back to an ancient period of Krynnish history, it is a simulation (actually an effort to diminish the terror) of the Dragon Purge waged in the early years of the Age of Mortals—a battle that neither humans nor any other mortal race could hope to affect. Grotesquely huge dragons fought one another for supremacy and control over the lands of Ansalon. The winners killed their victims and drained away their life essences. In the card game, players control these dragons and try to kill their opponent's dragons. From an intellectual vantage it becomes clear that this entire game, as entertaining as it is, remains nothing more than a way to allow mortals to assume some manner of control—if only symbolically—over the beasts that threatened to crush everything in their paths. Although the Dragon Purge has been over for nearly a decade, the Dragon Wars game remains popular across the continent. It probably will remain so until mortals find a way to drive the overlords from Ansalon.

The other card game developed since the start of the Fifth Age is known as Knights' Quest. Unlike Dragon Wars it does not mimic a real historical event. Rather it was designed during the months following the Second Cataclysm to provide comfort and hope to the people. In those early years, many refused to believe that the gods had actually withdrawn from Krynn. After all, following the First Cataclysm they hid themselves away from mortal eyes, but they never abandoned their world. Surely this situation was exactly the same, and if those with pure beliefs looked long and hard enough they would find the gods again and return the world to its rightful order. As we have learned, this is not the case. The gods do appear to have left the world behind, and no sign of them can be found anywhere. But people can dream of a better reality as they play Knights' Quest.

In this game two teams of two players each take the parts of the Knightly Orders. Since the Solamnics were the chosen representatives of Paladine, and the Dark Knights (who have recently renamed their order the Knights of Neraka) devoutly followed the tenets of Takhisis, they became representative of either team. In the symbolism of the game, each team wanders the world looking for articles of faith and evidence of the gods' continued existence. Articles of faith are represented by a particular suit of the deck (hearts for the Solamnics, and diamonds for the Nerakans), and the teams score points for collecting their proper suit, theoretically bringing more followers into their faith. When the hand is played out, the team that has gathered the most evidence of the gods receives divine blessings. Of course all of this is measured in points, and the team to reach a specific number of points is said to have proven their faith so steadfastly that the gods agree to show themselves once more.

Knights' Quest is played by two teams with two partners sitting across from each other. One team represents the Knights of Solamnia; the other represents the Knights of Neraka. Decide which team is which.

Remove the ace of spades and replace it in the deck with one joker. Shuffle the deck and deal out all fifty-two cards, giving each player thirteen cards. Cards are ranked from ace (the highest) to 2 (the lowest), with clubs ranked higher than all other suits.

After examining their cards, each player chooses three cards from his or her hand to pass to another player. After all players have removed these cards and placed them facedown on the table, they may pick up and add to their hands the cards passed to them. In the first hand the cards are passed to the player on one's left In the second hand they are passed to the player on one's right In the third hand they are passed to the player across the table (second from the left). In the fourth hand no cards are passed. This cycle then repeats until the game ends.

The player with the joker leads it into the first trick, then chooses and announces what suit the joker represents for this hand-this may be any suit except clubs. Going clockwise around the table, each player must play a card from whatever suit was led, the highest card of the suit wins that trick. If a player does not have the suit led, he or she may play any card-including a club. If anyone plays a club, then the highest club played wins that trick. After the first club has been played in this matter, all players have the option of leading dubs in future tricks.

The winner collects the cards from that trick and sets them aside. He or she has the lead for the following trick.

Play continues in this fashion until all cards have been played. The hand is now over; both teams should look through the cards from the tricks they won to calculate their scores. The game is over when one team scores fifty points or more. (Adjust this point total for longer or shorter games.)

Requirements for scoring points are slightly different for each team.

Knights of Solamnia: Score one point for each heart your team collected in winning tricks.

Knights of Neraka: Score one point for each diamond your team collected in winning tricks.

Both Teams: Count the total number of spades your team collected in winning tricks. If the total is seven or higher, score five points. Remember that the ace of spades has been removed from the deck, so it is possible that neither team has seven spades at the end of the hand. In this case, no points are scored for collecting spades.