But she barely knew Henley. She only saw him when he followed me here to make side bets or to spend the evening hiding from his girlfriends and she happened to also be in for a night of gaming. Still, it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that he managed to seduce her at some point and eventually she wanted revenge for this indignity. Except for one thing: she didn’t find anything about Henley impressive and thus wasn’t his type.
And then there is The Kid. We actually don’t know much about The Kid, since he likes to be mysterious. He is Orthodox Jewish and can’t be much older than twenty-one or twenty-two. He doesn’t seem to be in college, or else he finds college so easy that he is perfectly willing to spend all of his time hanging out with people twice his age in a dingy Greenwich Village den of iniquity. We don’t know where he gets his money to gamble, but he wins often enough that he isn’t in the hole, so we don’t have to care.
We actually all make money here every time we play, on account of the side bets and action around the world, with people logging on and watching us play games. They only really get to see the board and hear our patter, since as is tradition at Cardboard Struggle, our faces are obscured. Plenty of people have made guesses as to who the players are, but nobody has even come close. In the chat channel of the live stream I’m always referred to as Kimberly Drummond—the girl from Diff’rent Strokes—based on fleeting glimpses of me in shadow. I guess I do kind of look and sound like her, although anyone with an internet connection can quickly find out Dana Plato is dead.
We take our places around the table and all the bets are sorted out. Everybody meets my ridiculously high stakes. This is the kind of game that can take about eight to ten hours to play if everybody takes it seriously, and a $600,000 pot ensures that all the players will bring their maximum attention to victory.
The house rule is that performance-enhancing drugs are fine, but if somebody keels over or has to go to the hospital as a result of a bad crash or a crying jag or a heart attack, they forfeit their stake in the game and we kick them out and leave them on the curb and they can fend for themselves. Actually, except for the occasional Adderall, we’ve all basically learned our lesson by now and it’s rare that any coke or speed or even alcohol makes an appearance, although Shaheed and Wallace are constantly high, and I once beat the shit out of everyone at Diplomacy while candyflipping by weaponizing my own empathy. But that was back in my twenties, when Raj still had some hair on the top of his head.
Teeth of Steel is a fantastic game, even though it isn’t made by Nylo. It is an asymmetric war game, where there are two teams: the Nationals and the Rebels. You fight to vanquish the other side, but the winner is determined by which specific army on one side or the other is the most effective, meaning that there is internal warfare at the same time, which causes the game to mimic other kinds of political contests, like primaries leading to a general election.
The game is set in a fantasy world version of Civil War America and features Union and Confederacy generals from the real world: Grant, Meade, and Sherman versus Lee, Forrest, and Johnston. The difference is that each of their armies is composed of fantastical creatures with specific bonuses. Forrest’s cavalry, for instance, consists of massive blood-drinking demons who move faster each time they feast on the battlefield carnage of their fallen opponents—or allies.
I’ve decided to play as Grant’s steam-cyborg mech pilots, where stoic dwarves, constantly drunk and constantly chomping cigars, pilot huge and deadly eldritch machines that come on with an inevitability of purpose that I find irresistible. Plus, in this fantastical world, Grant is a short-haired redheaded woman with glowing blue eyes and I am pretty much in love with her.
29
We start playing. The hours disappear. For the first time since my father died, I feel a sense of relaxation, of relief, of camaraderie.
I end up on the same side as Shaheed and Wallace, who choose to play as the other two Union generals. I would ordinarily find it annoying to be paired with them since they are so inseparable, but I like being welcomed into their cabal this time. I don’t trust them and I know they will privilege each other over me, but I like that they are at least fake nice to me and seem to enjoy the illusion of everybody being on the same team.
We are opposed by Isabel, Raj, and The Kid, and they make a formidable array against us, but in some ways, the other team is actually too good, too cynical, too strategic. They can’t for a moment lose themselves in going for victory against us, and they are quite self-interested in each winning as the most impressive rebel general. Shaheed and Wallace provoke them every way they can. Being on this side of their united front, it is easier to understand why Shaheed and Wallace so often prefer the strategy of cooperation over the more cutthroat ambitions of the rest of us.
Things become dire as the early strategies of the Confederacy fail to pan out and it becomes increasingly clear that the North will win yet again in this ancient fight. Here is where the game truly gets brutal. The losing side has the ability to play kingmaker, surrendering to whichever general in the North
