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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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There are certain games with are keystones in my journey as a gamer. I’ve played a lot of games over the years but there are some games that stand out as games that influenced me in the games I play, how I play and what games I end up buying and keeping in my collection.
While it’s a game that I might not pick up now if I came across it today, Fluxx is definitely one of those games. Yes, it is a very random game that has a wildly variable playing time and I understand why it has its dedicated haters. However it was one of the first non-traditional games I encountered when I discovered they were out there after years of being a dedicated RPGer.
I first played it as a pick-up game at GenCon with a group of strangers. It was a new a different experience for me and one that stuck with me. When I had the chance to buy my own copy of the game, I picked it up and I played a lot of it over the next few years.
Part of Fluxx’s appeal for me was how portable it was. I could carry it anywhere and it was easy to get a game going while waiting for the rest of the D&D group to show, waiting for food to arrive at a restaurant or waiting at the airport. It was easy to teach and easy to get on the table. I even remember one series of back-to-back games where we had people coming and going and just picking up the last player’s hands.
Fluxx showed me a whole new social dimension to games. Playing D&D was an insular world where the group was tightly knit and adding new people was often very tricky. Not that that style of play doesn’t have its benefits but Fluxx was a game I could play with a lot more people and one that didn’t require the long term commitment that D&D did.
The other thing that Fluxx did was show me that there was a world of interesting games out there that did new and interesting things with mechanics. Along with Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico, which I was discovering around the same time, Fluxx let me know there were games out there that broke the rules, a world beyond monopoly and chess and tic-tac-toe.
Since then, my collection and my experience with games has grown considerably. I rarely pick up Fluxx anymore. I have come to prefer deeper games where a player has more control over the gameplay. Among Looney Lab’s libray, I consider the Aquarius family of games and the Icehouse/Looney Pyramid system to be much stronger games.
Still, I have a soft spot for Fluxx even now. A lot of other silly card games, like Munchkin, get their humor from jokes on the cards. A lot of Fluxx’s humor comes from how the cards interact with each other, which I think is much more interesting from a game design point of view. For all of the randomness, there is a definite structure to Fluxx with its four (now six) different kinds of cards and the way they work together.
Maybe there are folks who got their start with Advanced Squad Leader or Caylus or Dominant Species and never bothered with light card games. However, for me, this deck of cards was part of how I got my start and I remember it fondly for that.
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