It’s 3° F here in Boston, so I’m staying home and making bourbon baked beans
from my favorite cookbook, Sally Schneider’s A New Way To Cook.

This is the time of year when, aside from cooking baked beans, I want to
hole myself up in the darkroom and spend a weekend making photographs and
listening to the BBC.

Further thoughts on the gaming table: It’s said that tea drinkers are sippers,
and coffee drinkers are gulpers. I think of the gaming table as a tea drinking
activity, so perhaps the aesthetic should take something from the things
we associate with tea. Not to say it doesn’t belong in a coffee shop.

Physical/emotional things I associate with tea:

• obviously, a relaxed, lingering mood.
  
• small doses
  
• wood
  
• Asian stylistic simplicity: bamboo, cast iron and porcelain pots and cups, etc.
  
• subtleties
  
• roundness
  
• aroma
  
• winter weather, rain/snow

On other fronts, I’m looking with great interest at different interfaces, one of which may be ideal: it’s a touch screen but you can spill coffee on it, it works with an overhead DLP projector, and its got 0.1mm accuracy. It can also pinpoint who, of the people at the table, touched the screen! This is pretty exciting, but whether I can actually get my hands on one is another story— it’s still in a prototype phase.

Meanwhile, people I’ve described it to seem excited and receptive to the idea. One discouaging thought I had, though, is that the feel of board games may be eliminated by my design. The feel of wooden scrabble pieces, or playing cards being shuffled, or a soapstone chess piece in hand. It may be that this is a big part of the appeal of board games, and that my idea could fall flat by not being able to provide any substitute for this. What do you think?