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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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If you are like me, a lot of your game play takes place at places that aren’t your own home. Sometimes that means someone else’s home. Sometimes that means at a restaurant or a bar or a coffee shop. Sometimes, that even means on a plane or train.
That means that I don’t just worry about how much space a game takes up in my closet. I also worry about how easy it is to lug around and how hard it will be to set up where I’m taking it. As an extreme example, I’ve never actually played my own copy of Railroad Tycoon (not that that means I’m ever getting rid of it)
It’s also made me a little obsessive compulsive about packing up games and making sure that all the pieces are there but that’s another topic.
When I worry about how heavy a game is, I’m not just worried about how complex it is. I’m also thinking about how much it will weigh on my back 
While I do store some of my more frequently played games at the homes of the people who host, most of the time this means I’m carting whatever I’m playing to where ever I’m playing it. And since I serve as the game library for most of my gaming groups, that means whatever I’m lugging around is probably what's going to get played.
This gives me the glorious power of deciding what will get played (a wonderful power to someone like me who loves to try new games) and the heavy responsibility to trying to make sure that I pack things people will enjoy. It doesn’t always pan out. Although it’s been years, I’m still living down Alexandros. (The kidney stones were bad, Lowell, but not as bad as Alexandros.)
This has led to me packing a bag with the same kind of consideration that one puts a menu together with. What will serve as appetizer, possibly a game that will be played while waiting for others to arrive? What is a heavier game or two that will serve as the entrée, the focus for the evening? Should there be another light game to unwind, to serve as desert? And will something turn out to be the unfortunate Brussels sprouts and not get played?
A good evening is like a successful meal that everyone enjoys. A bad evening feels like Chef Gordon Ramsey is swearing at me.
Packing a bag of games is a mixture of considering people's tastes and physical engineering. It's a balance of the intangible demands of the people I game with and the very tangible restrictions of what I can cram into a bag.
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