*ATTENTION: The property is at sleeping capacity. You are more than welcome to come if you can bring camping equipment! We have lots of sleeping bags, pillows and other amenities to make your stay more comfortable

It seems like the time to revive traditional, chthonic Summer Games, including the Music Game, Exquisite Corpse, the Flag Riddle Maze Game, Barnball, Volleyball (Rally) 100, Watermelon Scrum, possibly one or two others (Zipline, Mazyrinth, Dictionary) if there is interest and time for them in the weekend’s schedule. We ask that all participants engage with all the games, either as a player or in support. (Watermelon Scrum, you may remember, is a challenge/duel game, and only for self-identified aqua-gladiators).

The meals will be the traditional meals (cold noodles, many mezze, Korean chicken, etc.) except that now the new smokehouse is operational and pulled pork will come from there. Here are brief descriptions of some of planned activities:

Music Game
-Each person chooses a piece of music of a specified length, on a specified theme, that is added to a playlist that all will listen to before voting for the best selection. Players have the option of explaining their choices and appealing for the votes of listeners.

Exquisite Corpse
-Each person makes a drawing (or two) on a 4x6 inch file card (with Sharpies primarily) that refers to a common element or theme. These are then assembled into a kind of mosaic and arbitrarily judged.

Flag Riddle Maze Game
-A two-stage, team competition in which players collect dozens of paired, tiny national flags that have been distributed randomly around a plantation of Norway Spruce trees. This frenetic stage is followed by a cerebral race to solve a series of riddles suggested by those 14 flags that are unpaired singletons.

Barnball
-A goal-scoring game with a vague resemblance to volleyball that utilizes the entire volume of a barn as its court. Each team occupies one hayloft (along with one “traitor” from the other team) and, with four balls in play, scores by striking the opposite wall of the barn with a ball, one point for a “grounder”, two points for hitting it on the fly.

Rally 100
-Each team forms a circle and tries to keep a volleyball “rally” alive for 100 taps. The team that achieves this in the shortest time wins.

Watermelon Scrum
-A one-on-one game in which one player on a raft directly challenges another to struggle for control of a watermelon beneath the surface of a pond. This continues until all challenges are decided or refused.

Bonfire
-Not a competition but a cooperatition for building a large, well-designed bonfire.

Other activities include, possibly, a vocalizing game designed by Lucas Crane, falling from a zipline into a pond as gracefully as possible, a game played in a vast, mysterious, goldenrod Mazyrinth, a Multitaire card game challenge competition, and an old-fashioned game of Dictionary in which players invent plausible definitions for totally unfamiliar but real words.

Now, there won’t be time or energy to do all these things, and we know that many of you are either conflicted about or constitutionally averse to “competition”. But “winning” really is totally irrelevant to the purpose of the Games, which is to create transcendent moments by doing trivial things relatively well.