From midwest U.S. fandom, it's on to Sweden for more fannish folklore. Ahrvid
Engholm, the writer of the following, has previously written for Mimosa
about Swedish fan publications, fan feuds, and fan hoaxes. He has been active in
fandom since the 1970s, when most of the games he describes originated.

For some reason, people don't think
that fandom is silly enough as it is, with grown-up people walking around in
propeller beanies. At least where I come from, the fans have tended to make fannish
life even more silly by introducing Silly Games.

The term 'silly games' often refers
to quiz shows, word games, and similar games at conventions. In Swedish fandom
such things have occurred, like the 'Fantasy Jeopardy' done at this year's big
fantasy con. It so happens that the referee as well as the people writing the
questions to Swedish TV's version of Jeopardy are fans, so we had a 'Fan
Jeopardy' with parts of the original staff.

But more often the Silly Games are
social things, done on club meetings, fan gatherings or parties. Here are some of
the Silly Games of Swedish and Scandinavian Fandom:

Yngve Is A Louse
Or rather, Yngve Holmberg was the
leader of the Swedish conservative party for some years during the 70's -- to some
that is equivalent of being a louse. Anyway, 'Yngve Holmberg' was the name of a
rather strange dialogue game popular around 1978.

The game consisted of saying the
names of famous Swedish politicians. A certain name triggered a certain response,
but the rules were rather obscure -- so obscure that I'm in fact not sure that I
ever understood the game. The rules were presented in a dialogue in the fanzine
Torkade Människor ('Dried People'), published by the fan couple KG
Johansson & Gunilla Dahlblom. (KG & Gunilla live quite far north. Some
years ago a fan planned a fan gathering on a train, to have a party while on the
train and then to visit KG & Gunilla. The plan moved along fine for some time
until the organizer got a letter from them: "It sounds swell! We're all for it!
But there is a problem. There's no train service to our town...")

I'm certain that this game later led
to the popularity of the dialogue game 'Stora Mossen' (which I have mentioned in
other articles), since the rules of both games were obscure. You say things,
pretend it has a meaning, and get a response that also pretends to have a meaning.
Thinking of it, it sounds like fanzine publishing!

Stora Mossen
'Stora Mossen' was inspired by the
game 'Finchley Central' of British fandom, but with one subtle difference: the
London underground has no station called 'Finchley Central', but there is a
station called 'Stora Mossen' in the Stockholm underground.

The game only has one rule: You take
turns saying metro stations in Stockholm, and the person who first says the name
'Stora Mossen' wins. This nonsense game at times managed to engage Stockholm fans
for hours and hours at fan gatherings in late 1979 and 1980.

In those days, we had lots of fan
gatherings, especially in Stockholm fandom. There were one-evening parties, fan
weeks, and fannish weekends. A 'fan week' was an open house for a week (when the
parents of the hosting fan unsuspectingly went for a vacation), when all fans could
come anytime, day or night, drink beer, write one-shots, listen to music at high
volume, sleep over -- and play silly games. The fannish weekends where similar,
but only for two days.

I remember a fannish weekend once,
when I woke up rolled into a carpet. I stood up, looked around and saw the editor
of the review fanzine Fanzine Press, famous for being late. "When will next
issue of Fanzine Press come?" I asked, as if it was the most natural thing
in the world to say the day after the Mother of All Parties.

Pirate Island
Games were also popular at meetings
of the Scandinavian SF Association. Most popular in those days was
'Sjörövarön' (or 'Pirate Island'). This was a board game where you
let small metal figures move over a pirate island in search of treasure. You moved
by throwing dice, and you could also shoot on opponents if they were in the line of
fire.

The figures had names, like 'Fatty'
or 'The Rat from Marseille', and you always had 'your' figure that you kept from
game to game. After a time, we began to develop special phrases that we said in
certain situations in the game, things like "The Rat from Marseille is always
fearless!"

Pirate Island was played with such
intensity that the board of the Scandinavian SF Association complained about us
screaming and running around. The question was brought up to a board meeting and
the players were asked to try to stay more calm. We eventually quit playing it
after the fan who owned the game set, Leif Euren, gafiated and took the game with
him. An attempt was made to revive the game in fandom around 1981, but failed
after we began to get on to other, more exciting games.

Meteorball
Two popular games were invented at
the regional Stockholm convention Nasacon, that was held ten times between 1980 and
1989.

'Meteorball' started at the 1981
Nasacon. This game is a version of softball. It is identical to Swedish softball,
except for one thing: instead of shouting "Out!" you have to shout
"Disintegrated!"

As you can see, shouting
"dis-in-te-gra-ted" gives the running player a definite advantage, since he has a
much longer word during which he can run and reach a base.

Nonetheless, Meteorball became a
regular event at every Nasacon, and occasionally it was tried outside the
convention. There was always one team from the club arranging Nasacon, Sigma Terra
Corps, and a team of 'The Rest'. Sigma TC won most of the matches, but it didn't
matter -- everybody had great fun.

Around 1989, I invented a variation
of Meteorball called 'Meteoriteball'. This was a game for few players, where
everybody took individual points and took turns hitting the ball. Meteoriteball
actually worked fine!

The Great Peanut Race
Another invention of Nasacon was
'The Great Peanut Race'. At Seacon, the 1979 Worldcon, I had witnessed The Great
Pork Pie Race, popular in British fandom for a few years because of the pork pies
that Brian Burgess (I think his name is) frequently would offer fans at parties.

The aim of that game was to
transport a pork pie approximately 20 meters. We didn't have 20 meters of indoor
space, so we changed it to 2 meters. And we used a peanut instead, an unpiled
peanut of the type that was popular on the meetings of the Scandinavian SF
Association in the 60's when Lars Olov Strandberg hosted them.

I think The Great Peanut Race
started at the 1982 Nasacon. A variety of methods was used for peanut
transportation: slingshots, frisbees, trained animals, water pipes, mechanical cars,
fireworks, gravitational force, and even mimeographs, to name just a few. (The
mimeograph transportation was simply a string attached to the rolls of an
electrical mimeograph. On the other end of the string was the peanut, and you just
turned on the machine.)

But around 1986, a superb team of
peanut fans calling themselves the Peanut Defence Initiative (from Reagan's
Strategic Defence Initiative), emerged on the scene and took all the first
prizes.

The first year, with PDI/1, they
presented the 'Electroshock Red Button Peanut'. A mad scientist appeared on the
stage and presented the set up that involved computers, a console, wires back and
forth, and an electric device. The process was computer driven. You entered the
correct codes, as when firing nuclear weapons, and a red warning light began to
flash. Then you pressed the big red button, and:

"At this point," as the scientist
explained with a heavy German accent, "the process is irreversible. The peanut
will be fired, whatever you do. Retaliation is on its way and can't be
stopped."

After the ten second countdown, the
electric machine went "poff!" and flipped the peanut about two meters.

The construction work in The Peanut
Defence Initiative was usually made by Thord Nilson, sometimes with assistance by
Nils Segerdahl, and Jorgen Städje stood for the Mad Scientist presentations.
(Thord is the kind of tech wiz that, if you leave him alone on a deserted island
with a paper clip and chewing gum, will have built a radio transmitter before you
come back.)

The second year, PDI/2 presented a
microprocessor-controlled precision motor, which directed a metal spoon that
flipped the peanut. This was, in fact, a rather sophisticated device. With
detailed assembler programming of the small microprocessor connected to the device,
it could do almost anything possible with a peanut and a spoon, including juggling
the peanut. The machine could also flip the peanut with the backside of the spoon,
which of course was called 'a backhand'.

The third and last year for PDI, we
saw the most complex machinery in the series, the PDI/3 Maglev Peanut Train. They
had actually built a short magnetic levitation train track, on which a small cargo
holder floated on a magnetic field. This was also the year when Swedish TV came to
Nasacon and made a story from the convention -- a full minute on the national news
program Rapport, seen by close to half the Swedish population. And of
course, they choose to focus the story on The Great Peanut Race. PDI/3 was shown on
TV, together with other entries like the Gunpowder Peanut invented by Engineer
Lindberg.

The success of PDI and the level of
technical complexity they reached was probably what killed The Great Peanut Race.
It became harder and harder to invent more spectacular transportation methods than
the year before.

Card Games
Some games were short-lived in
popularity and flourished at particular conventions. Fia med knuff (which
means 'Fia with a bump'; Fia is a female surname) is a simple boardgame, where you
move markers over a square board by throwing dice. When you come to the same spot
as an opponent, you can try to 'bump' his marker back to the start. There were
several tournaments of Fia med knuff at conventions in Gothenburg in the mid
80s. The game was also played at fan gatherings in Gothenburg.

Poker has always been a popular game
in Swedish fandom, since it can be played on long train rides to conventions. It
can also be played for long, long nights when the program is over and you can't
sleep. But it is always played in a friendly way, and people don't lose too much
money. I remember a Göcon night in Gothenburg, where I and half a dozen
people played poker for five hours and I lost heavily. I think I lost around two
dollars... Stakes were never higher than a few cents per game.

In Norwegian fandom, playing cards
without rules was quite popular a few years ago. I think it was invented by either
Johan Schimanski or Egil Stenseth, and I've seen the game being played a few times.
The idea is to confuse bystanders. The game works exactly the way it sounds. You
shuffle cards, deal, play out cards, etc. -- but without rules. You must make it
seem important and structured, and anyone watching will no doubt try to figure out
what you are playing -- and how.

Bheer Drinking
Naturally, bheer hewing has also
been very popular. This is not a fannish game, but since fans like bheer it has
become popular in fannish circles.

The tradition comes from the
students of higher education, especially those at the technical institutes. Bheer
hewing is very popular at student parties.

Usually you follow the Chalmers
Rules, i.e., the rules of the Chalmers Institute of Technology in Gothenburg. They
are:

1. You drink directly from 33
centiliter bottles.

2. Hands on your back when you start.
The bottle on a table.

3. The referee says "Drink!" and you
start drinking as fast as you can (a good bheer hewer can do a bottle in 4-5
seconds!)

4. The clock is stopped when you
bang the bottle to the table when it is empty.

5. There is always foam left in the
bottle. This foam is collected in a measuring tube, and gives you plus time on a
certain scale, depending on the amount of foam left.

At some conventions, they have even
started to take bets on who will win the bheer hewing competition. At one con,
contestants met each other two and two, like in a tennis tournament, and it all
ended in a final. (I think I reached the semi final of that tournament.)

The best thing is that the bheer is
usually paid for by the con!

Frozen Methane Hockey
And naturally, we shouldn't forget
'Frozen Methane Hockey'. In Sweden you can get a special sort of tabletop ice
hockey game, which is quite popular. Ice hockey itself is also quite popular
here.

In tabletop hockey you control five
players plus a goal keeper with metal bars that run under the 'ice'. It's a very
fast and entertaining game, once you get the hang of it. Tabletop hockey is played
both in Stockholm and Gothenburg fandom. In Stockholm we had a tournament, called
the Interplanetary Hockey League, where half a dozen members of the club Sigma TC
participated with their own teams. Each participant invented a name for his team
and names for the players, and even painted the figures of the table top set. The
founder of the Sigma TC, Wolf von Witting, was so enthusiastic about it that he
even published a few issues of a newsletter for the tournament, The
Interplanetary Hockey News.

We called it 'Frozen Methane Hockey',
since the idea was that it took place on the moons around Jupiter -- and not on
water ice. My team was called the Ganymede Heinleiners (from Robert Heinlein and
the novel Farmer in the Sky that took place on Ganymede) and the players
were all famous fans. I, for instance, had Walt Willis as center forward and Bob
Tucker as defensive player -- he was called Bob "Tough" Tucker and was a really
tough player that could shoot very hard and do 'smooth' goals. He would often
score with shots from his own defence zone. The Ganymede Heinleiners had bronze
shirts and dark blue trousers, and played rather well -- I think it ended second in
the league.

Other Games
Of course, there have been more
games. I remember I once invented a card game called 'Harry Warner's Fanzine
Collection'. We tried it, but the rules were so complicated that the game never
took off. I no longer remember the rules, in fact. It had something to do with
collecting different suits of cards to get a complete fanzine collection.

At a Tolkien gathering I go to every
year (that's about the only Tolkien thing I go to, though) they have several games,
of which 'Eat the Banana' is among the most popular late at nights. It involves
people trying to eat a banana in the most sexy way.

In the secret apa Cucumber (which I
have written about previously) we had a short lived play-by-mail game, 'The Battle
of the Milky Way'. Also, the fans in the city of Jönköping some years
ago declared their intention to develop a fandom role playing game, but I didn't
hear more of it after a while.

I haven't heard of any computer game
that has reached certain status in fandom. I once did a map of The Great Fannish
War of the early `60s for Broderbund's 'The Ancient Art of War', however, and I
suppose other games could be adapted to fannish circumstances.

Despite all these games in fandom,
Swedish fans usually don't take part in the mainstream game movement that has
become extremely popular. The National Board and Role-Playing Game Association of
Sweden now has 22,000 members, and many of their games are of sf or fantasy nature.
But the fans aren't interested.

There is a difference, I believe,
between inventing your own game and buying a commercial game. Inventing your own
game and having fun with it is creative, and fans like to be creative. Commercial
games are incredibly complex, expensive, and boring -- that's only for suckers, and
fans don't like being suckers.

All illustrations by Charlie Williams
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