After the first day of SDHistCon, where I played three games about opium peddling, I figured the second would be easier on my stomach. I could not have been more wrong.

It has no name. Its designer doesn’t want to be credited. Of all the many board games I’ve played, it’s the one that left me the most shaken.

“You are four senior Nazi officials,” our Teacher tells us. His hands are trembling. His mouth quirks between solemnity and something like an apologetic smile. “And you are conducting the Final Solution.”

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Words fail. I wish I could paint a better scene. A quiet room. People with serious faces. Light glittering off motes of dust.

But that isn’t how it looks. This is a board game convention. The hall is deafening, as it always is. The players are a mismatched bunch, as they always are. Every few minutes, a new group of onlookers stops to see what we’re playing. When they inquire about the game — curiosity piqued, I think, by our unexpected seriousness — they wince, as if at a bad joke, or their faces widen in surprise, or they turn and walk away, perhaps afraid of being associated with the plaything before us.

I’ll confess I also flee. While my body sits there, watching the setup: a regular deck of playing cards, arranged into a line of decks representing the West, the Deutsches Reich, and the East, with a fourth below the others for the occupation of Hungary; beneath those locations, seeded face-down, are Jews of various values. While my mind bobs, listening to the rules: how each of us will reveal, transport, and exterminate those Jews to earn points. While my soul aches: is this a trick? Am I meant to stand and announce, like some participant in Brenda Romero’s horrid rug-pull Train, with its Holocaust reduced to a punchline and its participants to rubes, that I will not play along?

As though in response, our Teacher clarifies. “You are senior officials. You are eager participants in this process. You know what’s happening.”

Well. So much for this being a trick.

A trick-taker, though? Yes. While half of the deck constitutes regions and Jews, the rest are used to play. The process takes shape. Each round is a hand of four tricks. Each suit is connected to a different organization and offers a different step in the process. The winner takes their suit and conducts its operation: one for hunting, another for transportation, a third for cleansing. The final suit is wild. The not-so-clean Wehrmacht, filling in the gaps.

But this wouldn’t be enough to accomplish much on its own. So, despite being desperate to climb the party ladder, the winner must always select one other official to partner with. Now with two cards added together, they can build a combo. Jew-hunting and Jew-killing in the East, the bodies stacked many miles short of the camps. Boxcars and the ovens, those old partners in crime. These collaborating officials then share credit for the undesirables they have sanitized together.

For a moment, I go again. Then our Teacher reveals the nine of clubs. “Nines represent bureaucratic obstruction. When they’re played into a trick, they decrease the value of the corresponding suit.” He pauses. Are his eyes twinkling with mirth or because they’ve grown watery?

“Get it?”

I’m slow. We all are. It’s one of my fellow players who catches the pun. “Nine,” he says. “Nein.”

“That’s right,” our Teacher says.

Slowly, like birdsong from behind razorwire, it twitters out of us. Not quite laughter. Something between a chuckle and a wheeze. It’s necessary, that release valve. Just the slightest bit of pressure vented from the boiler.

I can do this. I can do this.

This is how it happens.

Four officials hope to prove themselves competent and effective. The more prominent the Jews they find and exterminate, the greater their prestige. So they delve into the hidden parts of the Reich’s occupation. They uncover and transport and shoot and incinerate. They select their partners carefully, always elevating those who won’t threaten them in turn. In the East, they don’t bother with the trains. As soon as an undesirable is found, it is easier to kill them where they stand. In the West, far from the camps, they must first be removed and processed. When one of these officials rises above the rest, the others find ways to obstruct them. Paperwork. Troops on call elsewhere. Polite but stern refusals to collaborate.

This is how it happens.

The targets of our solution are not human. They are things. Cattle: unthinking, guilty of imagined sin, unclean from wallowing in their own filth. Cards: black and red suits for the lowborn, face cards for those with connections or wealth. Numbers: identities lost in a string of numerals, more indecipherable than gematria.

This is how it happens.

Two officials must cooperate in order to root out these things that are not human. They will share the points from those that they exterminate. But when I look around the table, I cannot see how this will be accomplished. There is no pencil and paper. There are no counters.

I am the first to succeed at our appointed task. All I play anymore are trick-taking games. That’s a joke I write sometimes when reviewing trick-takers. I didn’t grow up playing these games, but I’ve become good at them. A skilled hand.

Our Teacher hands me the card. And then, like fingers snapped in front of my face, he says, “Tear it in two. Give half to your partner. Keep the other for yourself.”

I do as he says. It is a violation. The deck is ruined. A life is ruined. The card is an eight of spades.

This was only the first trick. Eleven to go. I have been sitting here for ten minutes. It feels like an hour.

This is how it happens.

Playing this game, total focus becomes impossible. My mind ranges afield to topics that are difficult in their own right. I find myself thinking about how when my faith began its slow crumble there was no one I could speak to.

Not my wife. We had promised in the holy temple that we would keep forever faithful, and my doubts, concealed long before we knew one another, felt to me like a violation of that covenant. Not my friends. They were under-equipped and fell back on clichés that had the timbre of folksy wisdom but were meant to smother my questions in their crib. Not my father. Always, when he told me that he was proud of me, he said it was because I was good and faithful. To confess that I had never quite believed all the way, that now I maybe didn’t believe at all, would be to murder the one thing he prized about his only son.

So I went wandering. I went first to the appointed places. My bishop. My stake president. Neither had anything to say. So I went to the forbidden places. The bishop of a congregation in the same faith tradition. The pastor of a church down the road. Both were kind and had open ears, but could not tell me what I needed to hear. So I went further. I found a Rabbi.

When the Rabbi asked if I had read the Book of Job, there was no way to tell her that I had, countless times, in four languages, so often that I had big opinions about which translators and which word choices were the best and worst. Instead, all I could say was yes. I have.

And she said, “I think it’s marvelous that Job, our great hero of suffering, was a Gentile. That he was not one of us.”

In English, there are three translations of Job that speak to me.

Robert Alter’s Job is precise. After his long complaint against the evils that have been wrongly inflicted on him, after the Lord has appeared to him in the whirlwind, his statement has the tone of a legal concession. “By the ear’s rumor I heard of You, and now my eye has seen You. Therefore do I recant, and I repent in dust and ashes.”

Stephen Mitchell’s Job is awed at the majesty of the Unnameable. His smallness, the ease with which his body bends and breaks, become a reassurance. “I had heard of you with my ears; but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust.”

Edward Greenstein’s Job is defiant. Pain without purpose is not to be accepted, but confronted. “As a hearing by the ear I have heard you, and now my eye has seen you. That is why I am fed up; I take pity on dust and ashes!”

As I sit there, playing this unnamed game, I feel all three Jobs within me, refusing to resolve into a single entity. I am precise. The rules are my tool, the format my language, the victory conditions my sole aim. I am breakable. The magic circle is failing on all sides, the shame of murder bleeding into my fingertips, the safety of play no more secure than a blanket before the bullet. I am defiant. Suffering must be stopped. I must spit this bloody mouthful back into the face of whomever inflicts it, or I am nothing. I think these things while I play an untitled card game, and tear its cards to shreds, and wonder what I will take with me when it is done.

When the game has ended, we go out to lunch, all the players of the game and our Teacher, because even after that hour in one another’s company, to break apart now would be a violation of what has just transpired.

Our Teacher doesn’t know what to do with his game. There is maybe one publisher in the entire world he would trust with it, and maybe not even then. Personally, I tell him, if I had my way, the game would never be published. It should not be a game. It should be exactly what it was for me. It should be played by as many people as possible, but as something closer to performance art than a game. It needs to be played. But it needs more than the cards, more than the rules. It needs the Teacher. Maybe not him specifically. But someone whose words will quaver and hands will shake, who will interject that pun when the players consider backing out, who will instruct them to tear the cards in half. Who, afterward, will sit and eat dumplings and discuss the game’s intentions and imperfections. Who will speak. Who will listen.

Why did this game have such an impact on me? I’m still trying to decide. The immediacy of play, perhaps, or the magic circle showing its cracks. But I’ve visited the camps. Read the books and watched the movies. And this was the closest the blade has come to touching bone.

The rest of the day is a blur. I have a panel after lunch. I speak sluggishly and imprecisely. I play other games. I play them badly and distantly. I go out to dinner with new friends. I am off-balance, unable to express myself, hurting. I walk back to the hotel in the dark. On the way, I am accosted by someone in rags, carrying a beach chair in his hands and smelling of brine. Because I turn to look at him, he shouts that I am a faggot and a fat fuck, and shuffles after me and clutches my shirt and strikes me on the shoulder, and when I shove him off and hurry away, I wonder if I have done the wrong thing. Should I have helped? Should I have pushed him more gently? Should I have never looked at him in the first place?

Over the coming weeks, I carry the cards in my pocket. When I pull them out, I think about the game. I think about chimneys staining the clouds black. I think about a grandfather’s surname, changed to conceal his heritage. I think about the camp I visited in Israel, machineguns pointed inward. I think about play and death at the same time, and do not stop thinking for a long time.

Never again, I think. Never again for the six million murdered Jews. Never again for the millions of murdered Slavs and Poles. Never again for the hundreds of thousands of murdered disabled peoples and Romani and Serbs and prisoners of war and dissidents and intellectuals and homosexuals and all the rest.

Never again for anyone.