Poem: "The Best Games"

This poem came out of the December 5, 2012 Poetry Fishbowl.  It was inspired by prompts from aldersprig and laffingkat.  It has been sponsored by janetmiles and laffingkat.  This poem belongs to the series The Ocracies which you can explore further via the Serial Poetry page.

It was generally agreed
that the Plutocracy of Aurea
held the high hand when it came to gambling,
and that the Hamarchy of Helgi
did better at making game pieces
than actually designing games,
and that the Hoplarchy of Ledes
was unsurpassed at strategy
both in the marketing and the playing of games.

The Hipparchy of Pelip hardly cared,
finding tabletop games to be boring
in comparison to races.

The Bonocracy of Ophele, however,
excelled at creating cooperative games
and somehow the scoring always came out right
even though they built it more with intuition than statistics
which made Aurea's best accountants pull their hair
and wonder why they  could never quite get
numbers to do tricks like that.

In the court of Ophele,
the Queen's children played
with the children of ambassadors
from all different nations.

They dumped out the boxes of exotic wood
and mixed up all the pieces on the carpet
and invented new rules to make them all go together
so that everyone could have fun
doing something they enjoyed --
and those, they agreed, were the best  games.

When the ambassador of Ledes
scooped up his young son and
asked which country he most wanted to conquer,
he was horrified to be told:

"None of them, of course.
I don't want to go into battle against my friends.
War is dumb and it breaks things.
How can you play a game if you've lost all the pieces?"

Perhaps,
the ambassador thought glumly,
the people of Ophele
were the best gamers of all.