The Magic Mountain

You are convalescing at a sanatorium because you are very ill. It's your lungs. You may be here months or years, rarely returning to your homes or seeing family. You may die here. You follow the same routine every day, including time to eat, rest, see your doctor, and socialize. 

In this game, you will....

Experience seven years of time in under three hours.

Meditate on and discuss  death, music, passion, and reason.

Check out of your life and into a place where time has no meaning.

Everything you need to play is in one deck of cards!

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I first read "The Magic Mountain" at a time in my life when (like Hans Castorp, the main character of the novel), I was feeling stranded in a place out of time. I lost my job as an advertising copywriter in 2009, and spent the next several years flitting from contract writing job to unemployment, back to contract writing job, back to unemployment, to a period of grabbing any odd job I could. My life and career were completely on hold and like many people my age I felt stuck in a rut and questioned whether anything I was doing had meaning. I connected with the themes of the story and working through the ideas in it helped me through a difficult time. When I saw that the book had entered the public domain, I saw it as an opportunity to adapt a work with rare, personal meaning and recompose it to make new meaning -- and to give players the opportunity to do the same.