God Explains the Rules of His New Board Game

Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!

- By Teddy Wayne

O.K., so the board starts out with nothing on it and an infinite number of pieces packed into an infinitely small glass ball. To begin, everyone waits for an indeterminate period, because time hasn’t been conceived of yet in the game. Then the game master—yours truly—bangs the glass ball with a hammer, and all the pieces in the game explode outward to an infinite distance.

Yes, I’ll handle all the cleanup. Watch out for the glass shards, and don’t breathe in the radioactive cosmic dust.

Then we wait a few billion years in game time. You draw one random piece to be your player. For instance, one of you will be a thing called a “tail club,” which is a part of another thing called an “ankylosaurus.” Another one will be a “human being” named “Elon Musk,” which seems like one of the best pieces in the game, since it’s really powerful; the only disadvantage is that everyone thinks it’s a “fascist-adjacent dork with a shockingly bad sense of humor,” except for the pieces labelled “extremely online incel.” And you, my friend, will be a “guest star” on a “very special episode” of “Blossom.”