Air hockey at one end, shuffleboard at the other

THE GAME
ROOM

Cards and other diversions. Every cabin worth renting has a room like this, usually in the basement, usually next to a wood stove nobody needs.

On the table

What’s In Here

Chuckwordle Five letters, six guesses, one new word a day and the same word for everybody. Endless mode if you cannot wait until tomorrow. Streaks and a guess breakdown are kept on your own device, and the result copies out as a grid of squares so you can hold it over people. Gary turns up when you lose, which he enjoys. Guess → Ride to Bud Man Gerald R. Freeman Campground, drawn from the real surveyed map: every road, every lot number, right where they actually are. Pick any of the eighteen, start at 99 or 111, round up the gang and get over to Bud Man’s tent before the light goes. He camped beside us for two years, he wore a hat that said BUD, and he never once complained. Ride → Before Dark: Campground Drive The same campground from behind the wheel. Same survey, same roads, same lot numbers, except now you are driving through it instead of looking down at it. Nothing to collect and nothing to win. It counts the sites you pass, all 156 of them, under a sun that is already most of the way down. Arrows or WASD, space is the handbrake, and there are pedals on the screen if you are on your phone. Drive → Chuck Wagon Gangopoly Monopoly, played on Gerald R. Freeman. Every property is a real stretch of the campground — Honey Bee, Black Bear, Monarch, Brook Trout, Golden Delicious, Cardinal, all six of the loops, all 156 lots, each one on the board exactly once. Site 111 and Site 99 are the only two the campfire tape names by number, so they are the only two squares that are one campsite instead of a section, and they are the two worth the most. Click any square and it tells you what happened there. Two to five of you, pass the phone round. Break camp → Mountain Bikes On the County Line Road tape Jim describes “the campground where we rode our bikes” and puts it in the same breath as Shawn’s spider thing, which lands it square in the Bud Man years. Somebody else on the same tape asks whether that was the year they brought Brian mountain bikes across the lake. So: a side-on race down the shoreline to the boat ramp, four lanes, four of them against you. Hold the turbo as long as the bike will take it and get the nose down before you land. The jumps are ours — the only ramp anybody mentions on that tape is the boat ramp. Drop in → Campground Moto Motorcycles on the Black Bear loop, three laps against the clock. The road is the real surveyed one, just wider than it really is, and somebody has put three ramps on it. There is a start line, a finish line, a best lap that stays on your own device, and a lake that is best avoided. Arrows or WASD, space to brake, and there are pedals on the screen if you are on your phone. Race → No Gary Big bucks, no Gary. Stop the board, take the money, then decide whether you are greedy enough to go again. Gary sits on one face in six and he takes the whole bank when you land on him. Four of them and you are out with nothing. Prizes are all things off this site, so somebody is going home with Heath’s river rock. Press your luck → The Love Yacht Bulltown, 1989. The campground charges by the head, so Jim is in the trunk of Heath’s light blue ’63 Catalina, and he is rocking it on purpose because he knows you are at the guard window. Hold TALK to answer the man’s questions. You cannot steady the car while you are talking. Every detail of this one happened. Pull up → Bear Arms A shooting gallery, and the name is not ours: there is a photo in the 2016 yearbook of Mason in a gift shop pointing at a shelf of bear figurines labeled BEAR ARMS. Twelve shells, three rails, and everything riding past is something out of this site: Heath’s river rock, the doll with the knife, George’s tinfoil hat, the bottle that went off in the fire. Hit one and it tells you what it was. Gary walks the back rail and is not a target. Take aim → Pepper Man Sometime between 1993 and 1996, Shawn loaded George’s potatoes with pepper and told nobody. Here that is a maze: pepper every potato in the camp before George, Heath or Jim walks into you. Take an ember and the fire jumps, and for a few seconds none of them can see you. Twice a night the plate itself gets loose and runs, and that one is worth more than everything else on the board. Pick up the shaker → Showdown Two hands on the table: which one takes it? Or one hand and four choices: what is it, exactly? Dealt off a real shuffled deck and judged by a real evaluator, so it will not be talked out of a ruling. Useful mainly for settling an argument on the patio, and for whoever needed the rankings written out longhand at the first tournament. Deal me in →
The Tournament Not built yet. A blind timer for the cabin TV, chips and payouts for a field of fourteen, and a champions board that starts with Ryan and gains a name every summer. This is the one worth building before next July. Coming