2026/01 - The Difficulty of Getting Started
When the great Spanish cellist and conductor Pablo Casals turned 95, a young journalist asked him, “Mr Casals, you are 95 years old and the greatest cellist who ever lived. Why do you continue to practise for six hours a day?” Pablo Casals replied, “Because I think I’m making progress.”
They say the hardest part is getting started. But what about keeping going? To start with, you can kick things off with a masterpiece, but any old rubbish will do just fine. But to keep going, the rubbish has to be at least better than the last bit of rubbish. It’s not easy choosing the three new games that will continue the MINI CARD GAME series. It’s not easy trying to keep getting better and better. And the fact that GiocaGiullari have ranked one of our games in the TOP TEN of the best games released last year doesn’t exactly help to lower expectations. Sometimes I miss the carefree spirit of the early days. When something doesn’t exist yet, it’s always a potential masterpiece. One day, a classmate asked the teacher if anyone had got top marks in the test. ‘Yes,’ replied the teacher. She smiled happily. ‘Maybe it’s me,’ she said. In reality, she got a 2.5. But she was in a class where someone had got top marks, so, potentially, it could have been her. Choosing the first games to publish was that kind of joy. Two years and 10 games later, however, we worry more. Over 5,000 new board games are published every year, according to a random internet search. I don’t remember the source, so let’s just stick to ‘hearsay’. So it’s fair to ask whether the world of games needs yet another new game. And if we’ve already made games in our lives, whether we’re capable of doing ‘better’. But perhaps I’m worrying all this because I belong to a generation that grew up listening to songs like ‘Si può dare di più’ (We can do better).