Everything including the kitchen sink... but with special attention paid to board games, Jesus Christ, my family, being a "professional" (and I use that word loosely) Christian, and the random firing of the 10% of the synapses I'm currently using.
Proving once again that my superpower is Getting Random Strangers To Give Me Things (though, frankly, there are not enough Random Strangers and not enough Things Given), I just received a pre-release copy of Northstar Games Say Anything.The game itself is very simple - take the rotating Judge concept from Apples to Apples, add in the answer submission system (tiny dry-erase boards & pens) from Wits & Wagers, and top it off with a kinder betting system, also from Wits & Wagers. Players take turns being the Judge, who draws a question card & picks one of the five questions to read. The rest of the players then race to scribble out answers that they think will entice/entertain or otherwise engage the Judge.Example from one of our games the other night - my wife asked us: "Aliens have just landed on earth? What do you do?" Some of the answers were (from memory, so I'm not sure I'm completely accurate here):
"Hide!" (this was my answer)
"Run away"
"Kill 'em"
"Feed them something" (this was the answer that Shari picked)
After all the answers are in (the Judge gets to decide if answers are duplicates - you can't have those - and who got their answer down first), the Judge secretly picks the answer they like using the Select-o-Matic 5000, which sounds a lot more sophisticated than it is. (It's a spinner that doesn't spin very well - which is how it's supposed to work.) Then the rest of the players quickly lay their bets (each has two betting chips) on the answer or answers they think the Judge will pick.With the chips played, the Judge reveals their answer & points are scored - the system is designed to reward players who guess correctly without creating chances for runaway victories... in fact, the entire game is designed for maximum party enjoyment rather than maximum gamerness. (Yes, I know "gamerness" is not a word - but most of you get what I'm talking about.)I've had the opportunity to play the game twice now - once with 5 players and once with 7 players. The five player game was fun - enough so that we promptly roped 2 more people into the game & played with seven, which was a LOT more fun. I think the sweet spot for the game is probably 6-8 players.Here's what I like about the game:
plays quickly - a huge plus for party games
nobody feels dumb - you can approach how to answer the questions in whatever form you wish: you can try to please the Judge, you can try to be the class clown & make with the silliness, you can simply try & entertain yourself...
the score doesn't matter much - sure, if you're playing a 2 hour game of El Grande, you want to know the exact score at the end, but the draw here is not the winner(s) celebrating, it's the journey getting there
the rules - they are incredibly easy to explain
it's got the good parts of Apples to Apples with added creativity - the free-form questions means the game doesn't devolve into the same kinds of jokes & picks (as A2A has a tendency to do)
it simplifies the Wits & Wagers scoring - I love Wits & Wagers... but the betting system is tough for non-gamers to wrap their heads around. Say Anything uses the same kind of system in a way that's friendlier to non-gamers.
A warning: some of the questions on the cards could cause certain crowds to head in a PG-13/R-rated direction with their answers... while that's a selling point for some folks, I know a number of folks who read this blog work with youth & adults in faith-based settings. None of the questions are smutty (as in some other party games) but you'll want to be aware of this possibility. Please don't misunderstand me - I really, really enjoy the game; I'm just aware of the potential for problems in these kind of arenas.A final word: I saw the folks who played the game with us a couple of days later - and they were still talking about it. That's the kind of reaction you want from a party game! I see Say Anything getting a lot more play around here, esp. with Bible study groups & small parties.
Yes, I realize that the manufacturer suggests this is a game for 9 year olds... I also realize that setting up the board & various traps requires an engineering degree. That doesn't change the fact that this bluffing game is well-suited for younger elementary kids with the pitch perfect mixture of mechanical silliness & easy game play.
The article at Wikipedia does a splendid job of describing the play of the game, so I won't bother with trying to do that again. What I want to do instead is try & explain the attraction of the game as a kids game:
the traps: it's fun to spring the traps on the various characters... I'm esp. fond of the fireplace trap.
the bluffing: there's a certain point (with most kids, it's between age 6-8) where the concept of bluffing "clicks"... where they understand pretending that they are rooting for one piece when they really control another piece
the timer & the portrait: these two mechanisms combine to make for some pretty serious tension... tension that builds throughout the game
Yes, there is potential player elimination... but the game is short enough that elimination shouldn't be a big deal.The game was republished with slightly tweaked rules & pieces in 2002 as 1313 Dead End Drive... that edition is easier to find and is the one listed in the "cost" section above.
...my natural "coolness" compensates for the fact that I'm posting the results of this silliness on my blog.What?! You say I don't possess natural coolness?!Ah, heck... you're probably right.
...but what kind of moronic nutball do you have to be to give the Origins Award for best card game of the year to Zombie Fluxx instead of Tom Lehmann's brilliant Race for the Galaxy?!Look, I'm not saying that people don't enjoy Zombie Fluxx - heck, I like Sequence, which is almost as random. It's just that years from now a new zombie-fied reprint of an 11 year old card game is going to look like a pretty silly choice. (There are now, btw, 7 different versions of Fluxx, not counting the expansion sets.)OK, it's not "years from now" and it looks like a pretty silly choice. Sigh. Hard to expect better from the folks who thought Stephensons' Rocket was a sci-fi game.
cost: I could not find a copy of this for sale online from a trusted source... sorry.
The two dashing gentlemen in the picture are Ted Cheatham (designer of Silk Road & Gumball Rally) and Greg Schloesser (head of the IGA & well-known gaming figure)... and it was taken in my game room in Nashville, TN, about 7 years ago. This was our late night silliness - and "The Intractable Mules" (that's how the title translates) was perfect.
What I've found out over the years is that DSM (I'm not typing that name again - no way) works just as well with kids as it does with adults. I'm not sure where Klee (the manufacturer) came up with age 8+ recommendation... I've had kids as young as 5 play it and play well.
The game itself is simple - each player is a mule with a blanket that matches one side of a color die. Any missing colors are filled in by neutral mule driver tokens. On your turn, you roll the 2 dice & move the respective pieces one space forward. (If you roll doubles, that piece moves 1 space backwards.) Then you pass the dice to the next player. They may choose to "hold" one of the dice (keeping it on the same face/color without rolling it) but they must roll at least one die. When the first piece (mule or mule driver) reaches the end of the path, Ted shouts something unprintable (OK, that's only when you're playing with Ted) and all of the pieces are turned around and begin racing back towards the ranch (start place).
You win in one of two ways:
If you're the first mule to arrive at the ranch, you win IF the last piece remaining on the board is a mule driver.
If your mule is the last piece on the board, you win.
So, at some point in the game, you have to decide what your "strategy" (and I use the term loosely) will be:
pushing all the other mules & drivers toward the ranch in order to be the last mule standing OR
racing to the finish while pushing the other mules forward & leaving the drivers alone OR
just rolling the dice & hoping for the best (this happens more often than you'd think)
With the silly mules & fast play, it generates a lot of fun in a short time... and works well with groups of kids (w/an adult to referee), mixed groups of adults & kids, and (as you can see from the picture) is a great closer for game groups.Interestingly, the game was re-published in 2002 with some small tweaks as Trampelfanten. The theme now is stampeding elephants, the pieces are wooden rather than cardboard, and the only rule change I could see is that players who are finish second or worst can still roll even though they're off the board. (In DSM, only the first mule home & mules still on the board can roll - which I think prevents kingmaking.) Sadly, it's also out of print & hard to find.
My buddy Zion Red (hi, Paul) and I don't always agree on politics, but we both are horrified at the garbage that floods cable channels and radio waves that masquerades as biblical Christianity. He's made a couple of posts recently that are worth your examination: the crisis in christianity & money, its a gas (with the requisite shout-out to Pink Floyd).His posts reminded me of an amazing rap/dance piece I saw at Mosaic last year - and so I hunted it down on YouTube for y'all. (BTW, as cool as it is here, it was stunning live.)And, because one thing always reminds me of something else... some extra special Steve Taylor wonderfulness - Cash Cow: A Rock Opera In Three Acts. (Best line ever: "The golden cash cow had a body like the great cows of ancient Egypt And a face like the face of Robert Tilton ...without the horns.")
I'll write more on this later - but for now, get up off your duff and go see Wall*E on a big screen. Not only is the animation amazing, but the story is intriguing & beautiful & thought-provoking. (And ignore the hyper-conservative whining about "political undertones" - sheesh. Go find something real to blog about already.)From the review at Robert Wilonsky:
Many will attempt to describe WALL-E with a one-liner. It’s R2-D2 in love. 2001: A Space Odyssey starring The Little Tramp. An Inconvenient Truth meets Idiocracy on its way to Toy Story. But none of these do justice to a film that’s both breathtakingly majestic and heartbreakingly intimate—and, for a good long while, absolutely bereft of dialogue save the squeals, beeps, and chirps of a sweet, lonely robot who, aside from his cockroach pet, is the closest thing to the last living being on earth.
Take a dash of Bambeleo (the tilting board), add some card-based movement of common pieces (in other words, every player can move every piece) and give it a whimsical theme (beavers taking apart a raft in order to build a dam)... and you've got Mein Lieber Biber. (BTW, that literally translates "My Lovely Beaver" - but the idiom is better translated as "My Friendly Beavers".)
On your turn, you play one of your color-coded cards to move one of the beavers along a series of life rings - if you manage to land one on a life ring that matches his color, you get a "log" (brown Settlers road). If, as happens once in a while, you manage to get a beaver off the raft, you get a log as well.
Of course, you don't want to make the raft capsize - if moving the piece you've chosen cause one or more beavers to go sliding off, the round ends & you lose all your logs. (BTW, this is usually how a round ends when playing with kids.) Play three rounds & find out who has the most logs.
The game as published is not quite tippy enough... you have to get the beavers scattered way across the board to see any real tilt. After trying a number of different ways to fix it, I finally discovered a simple & inexpensive way to make the game work like a charm - put a small piece of felt underneath the wooden pivot piece... the added cushion gives it a little more tippiness without making the game too difficult.
Monte Rolla is an object lesson in how to take the same basic elements as a supposedly "classic" game (Chutes & Ladders) and turn them into a game people (esp. kids) enjoy playing. You've got your dice rolling, your pieces moving forward or backwards due to the design of the board, and it's basically a race to the finish.
But Monte Rolla gives you two men (marbles) rather than one - so every turn you can decide which piece is the best for you to move. Roll a "6" and you get to roll again and add the rolls together, speeding up the game a bit.
The real act of design brilliance, though, is the thick board which is elevated in the middle, making river paths that take the pieces backwards (in the first & third sections of the race) and forwards (in the second & final sections of the race). Every kid I've played this with has been utterly fascinated by the process of letting their marble go cascading down the river - even when it hurt them! There's a couple of places in the first section where your marble getting knocked downstream can even knock other marbles back.
The first player to get BOTH of their marbles to the sea (finish line) wins... which leaves you with an interesting problem. If you finish one marble quickly in order to keep it safe, you are now at the mercy of the die roll - while the players who balance their marbles' movement always have options.
I know it doesn't sound like much - I can hear some of you shaking your virtual heads at this one. But it is one of the games that's consistently requested by kids who've played it at our house... and that counts for a bunch in my book.
...which, btw, wasn't this last week. (I know some of you are wondering what happened to the blog - I was posting at least once a day from early June and then suddenly, poof, no posts. For some of of you, it was like your local Starbucks refused to put caffeine in your coffee.)
Anyway, when I went to Santa Clarita (in January of 2007, I think), I took the train - and, as often happens on the route south out of Fresno, we got shuttled to a siding as a bigger train went by.
That's roughly what happened to the blog this last week - my mom & dad & sister all came to visit, which was wonderful but not conducive to blogging. At the same time, we were finishing up our Vacation Bible School here at NewLife, which is also wonderful (lots of kids expressing an interest in knowing more about being followers of Christ) but also a giant time sink.
So, the blog has been on a siding. I realize that I need to play "catch-up" on the Kid Games 100 (my intention was to be to #70 by the end of June) and there's been some great questions in the comments (Jeff & Jon, I'm talking about you) regarding the Framing The Conversation series that need meaningful answers... plus family is giving me a hard time about not putting up more pictures of the boys.
So, I'll work over the next few days to get off my virtual duff & put my nose to the grindstone (aka fingers to the keyboard). Meanwhile, a quote about postmodernism from a book about physics & social scientists I've been reading:
Nowhere is this more evident than in the perversely influential "postmodernist" school of thought, which insists that there isn't actually a real world "out there" with objective properties that we can try to understand. Instead, truth is completely arbitrary and "constructed" in a social manner by tacit agreement. Another common assertion is that because our thinking & communication are so intimately linked with language, everything can be viewed as a text, and social theory becomes more or less equivalent with literary criticism. Nothing that anyone has ever written has a fixed or true meaning;
readers make up the meaning as they go.The British historian Geoffrey Elton referred to the postmodernist trend as "the intellectual equivalent of crack" for its seductive, anything-goes style of theorizing that
essentially frees the author from any responsibility to think coherently. (Mark Buchanan, The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You)
follower of Jesus, husband, father, pastor, boardgamer, writer, Legomaniac, Disneyphile, voted most likely to have the same Christmas wish list at age 44 as he did at age 14
Proving once again that my superpower is Getting Random Strangers To Give Me Things (though, frankly, there are not enough Random Strangers and not enough Things Given), I just received a pre-release copy of Northstar Games Say Anything.
The game itself is very simple - take the rotating Judge concept from Apples to Apples, add in the answer submission system (tiny dry-erase boards & pens) from Wits & Wagers, and top it off with a kinder betting system, also from Wits & Wagers. Players take turns being the Judge, who draws a question card & picks one of the five questions to read. The rest of the players then race to scribble out answers that they think will entice/entertain or otherwise engage the Judge.
Example from one of our games the other night - my wife asked us: "Aliens have just landed on earth? What do you do?" Some of the answers were (from memory, so I'm not sure I'm completely accurate here): 
