Uncle Chestnut's Table Gype on Kickstarter

Paul Nowak of Eternal Revolution has begun a Kickstarter Campaign to continue the production of Uncle Chestnut's Table Gype, which just won a MENSA select award and was also on our Games 100 list for 2011. Paul just sent me a copy of this wonderful game, and I hope to have a review of it here in the near future. In the meantime, enjoy these video that explain a bit about the game, G.K. Chesterton, and Distributism.

Chesterton On Chess and Madness

The previous post about Bobby Fischer calls to mind a famous passage from Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton. Long before Bobby Fischer, G.K. Chesterton wrote of the madness of chess players, the sanity of the imagination, and the challenges of reason. (I've paragraphed the passage to make it easier to read on the blog.)

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. 

Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram.[...] 

The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein*. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

*Note: This is a reference to Montague Holbein, who tried to swim the English Channel.

Chesterton On Games

I'm an avid Chestertonian, so I loved this shirt from Eternal Revolution, the makers of Uncle Chestnut's Table Gype. Make sure you look around their shop while you're there, and learn a bit about Distributism while you're at it.

UPDATE: Brett J. Gilbert shot me a Twitter message with a link to the entire essay from which this quote is taken. People, if you love language, if you love a man with a cheerful hunger for life, if you simply love good humor, then you need to read more G.K. Chesterton. He is the great author that your teachers kept you from all those years because of his dangerous ideas. You become a better person for having read him.