Petey's Bag Versus My Deck Argument

Petey and I have had some version of this argument at least a dozen times by now, and neither of us has budged an inch. My position is that a proper cloth draw bag, real weight to it, a satisfying give when you reach in and fish around, is worth more to how a game feels than most publishers seem to think. His position is that a deck of cards does the exact same job with less production cost and fewer places for the mechanism to go wrong, and that I’m being sentimental about texture.

He’s not wrong on the mechanics. A shuffled deck and a bag of tiles produce the same randomness on paper, and I know that, I’m not arguing the math with him. What I’m arguing is the part that doesn’t show up on paper, the specific tactile moment of not being able to see what you’re grabbing, fingers moving around cloth and wood and cardboard chits, versus flipping a top card you can already half-guess the range of just from handling the deck all game. One of those feels like reaching into the dark for something. The other feels like turning a page.

I brought this up at the museum once, half joking, and Marisol pointed out that plenty of the specimen storage I fuss over so much is basically the same argument in a different outfit, a proper labeled drawer versus a plastic bin doing the identical storage job for less money. She’s got a point I don’t love conceding. I care about the container as much as the contents in both places, workshop and game table, and I don’t think that’s really about function at either one.

Petey and I aren’t going to settle this, and at this point I think we’ve both stopped actually trying to. It’s become one of those recurring bits that shows up every time a new box hits the table, him needling me the second he sees a bag, me pretending to be more offended than I actually am. I’ll take the needling. My only real qualification in this argument is being well-equipped for caring about lots and lots of bags, apparently, and I’d rather have a running joke with someone who’s shown up to the same table for years than win an argument about tile-drawing mechanics that was never really about tile-drawing mechanics in the first place.