A Road Less Travelled

 So, there’s this game called Blue Moon. The oversimplification of the rules goes like this: You play cards, trying to beat the number of the last card played by your opponents. (There are various things you can do to boost those numbers, but this is the oversimplification, remember?) You continue until one person retreats, and the next round starts. Every time you retreat your opponent gets a point.

Naturally, I have always played this game as though every round were the deciding factor. I eke out every last drop from my hand of cards, hoping against hope that this bare minimum play will  be the last straw for my opponents resources. Never give up! Never surrender! Never retreat!

And then it occurred to me that I could retreat before it got to the point. I could let my opponent win a battle in order to put myself in a more strategic position for the war. Retreat before it’s a dire necessity? Whoa. Weird.

This is when I discovered that I don’t like to retreat. I tried it, and it worked well as a strategy. But it felt wrong. It felt cowardly to flee the battle when I still had resources at my disposal. It felt like surrender. This probably says something about me in general, but I’m not sure what. Consider it a random observation.

This post was going to end there until I realized that this all sounded vaguely familiar. Hmm. You’d think I would have  connected that up a lot sooner. Except that moving to the country has never felt retreatist to me. To follow the analogy, it feels more like stratigic deployment of troops to secure supply lines and provide training camps and defensible bases of operation.

It does make me wonder though how this does show up in the way I think. What in real life would I consider to be ‘retreating’? And is it actually strategically sensible or not?