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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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Hoity Toity is one of those games that I don’t play very often and, when I do, I wonder why it doesn’t hit the table more often. After all, it is an award-winning game by Klaus Teuber of Catan fame, not to mention a very good game. However, it tends to get overshadowed by its younger and flashier brethren, only occasionally waving at me from the shelf.
Hoity Toity, as my copy is labeled (the game has more names than a master spy) is a game about being the idle and possibly inbred rich whose lives revolve around amassing collections of antiques in a never-ending quest to out-do each other. Using a rock-paper-scissors mechanism of role selection, you buy antiques, display collections of them, hire crooks to steal other players antiques or detectives to knick said crooks (It’s a fair cop, gov’ner)
And, in all honestly, it is a rather fun game. All the little mechanisms and little whirly bits which look a little funny at first come together quite nicely as a mechanically solid game. It is seriously one of those games that, every time I play it, I wonder why I don’t play it more often. However, that’s not what I want to ruminate on.
I believe that Hoity Toity is as close as you are going to get to playing a game that unfolds like the plot of a P.G. Wodehouse novel.
Wodehouse is one of my favorite authors and I will hold out that he was one of the best writers of the twentieth century. Yes, it is true that Wodehouse’s works are light hearted trifles where a tragedy is your cravat doesn’t match your spats and a woman should choose her husband based on his golf handicap, but darn it if he didn’t write them really, really well. The world is not like Blandings Castle but sometimes I wish it was.
And really, if you were to replace the word crook or thief with the words Bertie Wooster, Hoity Toity would suddenly be like a Jeeves novel in board game form. Seriously, how often does poor Bertie get roped into stealing something for one of his friends or aunts? Aunt Dahlia, even though she should know better, has had him steal antique silver cow-creamers on more than one occasion. (I think. Maybe the one occasion was just that memorable that I can’t ever forget it)
(Actually, for a light-hearted author who wouldn’t dream of writing about murder, arson or rape, Wodehouse has his characters stray from the straight and narrow on a regular basis. Quite a few of Wodehouse’s helpless heroes find themselves wandering around a British manor house in the middle of the night, wondering how they ended up in this mess. The number of his works that DON’T involve breaking the law are scant)
As Hoity Toity progresses, collections of antiques get bigger and more valuable. The castles you are showing them off in get more and more opulent. And, of course, the stealing gets more and more ridiculous as items move from collection to collection as if you were tossing Ming vases around like they were footballs. Poor Bertie has to be exhausted by the end of the game, having been breaking into castles on an almost constant basis without even pausing to say “It’s never lupis.” (Wait, wrong High Laurie character) It develops the pace of a Wodehouse novel with everything getting bigger and more frantic. And, since in the end, all you’re fighting for is bragging rights and all the losers lose is a bit of esteem, the stakes feel like a Wodehouse novel as well.
I think that it is perfectly natural for a narrative to emerge from game play. It happens all the time. However, Hoity Toity is one of the few games where that narrative makes you go “Wait a second. When did we end up in an Edwardian comedy, old bean?”
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