The smell of fun

A few weeks ago, I hosted dinner and a night of Settlers of Catan with another couple and my former roommate. It was a very entertaining evening, and the other couple is already planning the next get-together, when they hope to end my undefeated winning streak. While I plan on addressing the boardgame “metagame” in a later post (or, rather, why I tend to lose when my wife is playing), this post is only peripherally related to boardgames at all.

You see, this couple that we played with – they’re vacationing for the next three weeks and decided to leave us with their newly purchased, still-sealed box of Cities and Knights expansion, hoping that we can acquaint ourselves with the new rules and fill them in when they return. Like a kid on Christmas morning, I ripped the plastic right off of the box and started sifting through the new stuff we’d soon be playing. I carefully applied the knight stickers and punched out the various cardboard pieces.

At that point, my attention fell to the sealed pack of commodities and progress cards. After tearing the plastic from the stack, I did the one thing I’ve always done after opening a sealed, brand new pack of cards – I smelled them. And I’m not just referring to the passive realization of their scent. Neither am I referring to a quick passing of the nose over said cards. When I smell cards, I smell them. I smell them like a wine connoisseur at a tasting. I riffle the cards beneath my nostrils. I fan the cards closely in front of my face. And I let that smell linger for a good minute or so. It was a good smell.

Of course, this all happened as my wife sat on the couch peering over her DS in near horror. She witnessed a similar event a while back when we bought Super Smash Brothers Melee and I opened the case to discover that the game manual smelled an awful lot like a freshly opened CCG starter deck – I couldn’t remember if it smelled like a Decipher game (those Star Wars cards smelled awfully good) or like the higher-quality cardstock of an AEG game. I flipped through the pages (multiple times), inhaling deeply, just to see if I could ultimately pinpoint that distinctive scent.

I think the primary reason for this behavior is my brain’s deep association between fun and the smell of cards. This behavior emerged after one particular summer right before my senior year of college. During this summer, I was living on-campus in a small dormitory single doing some IT work for the school. Every Thursday night, a friend would come over and we would spend the entire night gaming – sometimes we’d play some random games on my aging computer, but the agenda for the season was CCG’s – lots of them. We delved into as many classics as we could get our hands on through the discount channels of eBay. We were connoisseurs, and cards were our wine. We’d often tour the area’s local game shops, and every night, we’d stop by a local Quickly for a couple cups of cheap boba, after which we’d visit a neighboring comic and card shop, where we’d pull out a table and play our own game-of-the-week alongside the Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic junkies. We played Battletech. We played L5R. We played Doomtown. We played Netrunner – lots of Netrunner. Those days saw the first (and only) time I was flatlined by Schlaghund in my very own Tag-n-Frag deck my friend had borrowed. It was a beautiful defeat.

The opening of a new starter deck or a box that had just arrived from eBay – that was part of our weekly ritual. The scent of cards that wafted from the newly opened packages became indelibly linked to the night’s subsequent adventures. It’s for these reasons that I still enjoy a good cup of boba every so often and why I feel compelled to sniff every pack of cards I open. It’s the same feeling you get from taking a whiff of mom’s homemade cooking – it brings you back to good times.

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