Where Are My Games At?

I recently read a post on Meeting a Game Where It's At by Dungeon Merlin—The RootRing Random button continues to bless me—and it made me pause to think about which games I'm playing and what their intended goals are, so to speak. I'm mainly playing two games these days: Cairn, and a bastardized b/x Wolves Upon the Coast hack that I've really been enjoying. CairnSo where is Cairn? It bills itself as a game designed to run fantasy OSR modules with the simple fiction-first focus of an odd-like, and I think it achieves that. But let's dig a little deeper. What's the flow of play? What are the broad structures that Cairn assumes or flat-out states that really make it sing? Is This Scooby Doo?I mean this with the utmost respect. I can't count the many evenings I spent in front of the TV trying to guess who the criminal was before the gang unmasked them with their antics. The gang was always the same, but the situations were rarely connected, and no over-arching narrative emerged. Cairn…