Top Qualities

Glory and I were at loose ends on a Sunday afternoon when we had the house to ourselves. This doesn't happen too often and we wanted to take advantage of it. She suggested we play a boardgame, and of the three I suggested, she selected Stratego. I dusted off our vintage (1962) edition of the classic game and we had at 'er.

Stratego is a great mix of strategy and luck, and I suggest more of the latter was in play for my victory. I could hear the gears meshing in Glory's cold-addled brain as we played though, and I know many of my stratagems will find no toehold the next time we face off.

As good a game as it is, the tedious setup and attendant overthinking make it a poor candidate for back-to-back play, so instead I dug into the closet and excavated my collection of tops and the stadium for combatting with them.

They are better known as Beyblades now, but when I was a kid, the most intriguing game I ever saw advertised was Battling Tops. Here was a game where something actually happened! There was motion, kineticism, and all the other qualities I had in mind when I purchased them over a decade ago.

I'd love to tell you that I got them with the girls in mind, but the truth is, they were for me and my mates. We unleashed them at G&G V and a handful of times since. I'd even gotten some more as gifts a few Christmases back, but the bigger, flashier models lacked both the performance and appeal of the smaller knockoffs I'd bought at Comex Hobby in West Edmonton Mall back when I worked there.

Glory was happy to see them reappear, and we spent over an hour testing launchers, experimenting with left spin vs. right spin and comparing the various scales of tops as we battled it out in the Heavy Metal Stadium.

It was a lot of fun, and we thought we would shoot some slo-mo video with the iPad for additional giggles. It was actually handy for determining match winners in a couple of photo-finish situations.

Mostly though, we enjoyed the instant replay feature to see how close to the exit some tops came:

...and some of the more dramatic match finishes:

I lack the physics and engineering wherewithal to tell you why some tops fare better than others, or why aggressiveness attacking often trumps endurance but not every time. Regardless of how they work though, I am astonished at how quickly we move to imbue them with human characteristics like stamina, agility, and even courage.

I quickly became attached to a battered blue top that I would have sworn to you had the heart of a champion. Blueboy won more matches than any other single top.

Moreover, he did so despite having a chunk ripped off of him in an early match, demonstrating real heart and astonishing quantities of both chutzpah and temerity for an inanimate object (to hear me tell it, at least).

Can a toy top have character? It's doubtful. But conversely, when Blueboy finally lost a step and succumbed to a (much larger, probably juiced) competitor in a gruelling matchup, his green replacement fared so poorly that he didn't even warrant a name. That didn't stop me from threatening to shitcan every green top in the house if he didn't shape up, though. I recognize such abusive tactics rarely garner the desired results (and did not in this case either) but in truth it was a little bit liberating, knowing that the top's feelings were unlikely to be hurt, and also seeing how amused Glory was by my misbehaviour.

Somewhere in the hazy middle region between an appreciation for our tendency to anthropomorphize everything we possibly can and the simple elation of two carefree people playing with age-inappropriate toys, my youngest and I had a truly enjoyable Sunday afternoon, and put a particularly trying week just a little further behind us.