Game night! Woo!
This past Friday I attended a get-together held by my former adviser so that all of her students could meet her brother, who would be in town for a few days. The idea was to have a whole mess of people over, eat food, drink drinkables, and play as many games as we could squeeze into the evening and early morning. Now, while I consider myself to be a gamer, I’ve never gotten into tabletop, card or board games. I tend to lose interest quickly and then don’t feel like playing, which really isn’t fair to the other people who are involved. Even with video games, I was never into the multiplayer aspects. You see, I am a lone wolf. I walk alone, I howl into the cold wind, no one can know my heart- *ahem* Anyway… In recent years, I’ve developed a bit of a work-around to this, which pretty much boils down to making smaller games within whatever it is that I’m playing. Most of these meta-games could be considered griefing but I like to think that I do it in such a way as to make it equally funny/uncomfortable for everyone. (Of course, you’d have to talk to the people I play with to really find out.)
I got myself involved in three games that night: Betrayal at House on the Hill, Monty Python Fluxx, and Citadels. I’ll be discussing each of these games but in the interest of keeping the blog posts relatively brief, I’ll cover the other two at another time. Betrayal at House on the Hill is a survival horror game that plays out very much like an episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! I had a lot of fun with it, donning the hat of Ox Bellows who was a less-than-intelligent, athletically-inclined individual. Once I figured out that you can increase the intelligence of your character through certain artifacts I was determined to help Ox reach a 3.0 GPA and get into a college based on something more than being able to knock over people on the football field. Alas, it was not to be, as an unfortunate series of events started up The Haunting. (These events included a burning and screaming specter, a room seemingly constructed out of fresh roast beef, a mysteriously smoky outdoor patio area, and the heart-warming adoption of a small child who was separated from her parents but not from the volumes of paperwork needed to make it all a legally binding affair. Now if that doesn’t qualify the house as already experiencing something of a haunting, I don’t know what does.) So there we all were, watching in horror as our evil doppelgangers (complete with jet-black Snidely Whiplash mustaches, regardless of gender or previously existing facial hair) stepped out of the shadows and began hunting us. Always one to make the best of a bad situation, Ox got stuck in a room with his double and they alternated knocking each other around until one of them would pass out, which is actually how Ox spent most of his weekends with the other football jocks. So it was great fun… that is until one of the other players ruined everything by thrusting a Crystal Ball into Ox’s hands which triggered some sort of magic crystal allergy in the evil twin and killed him. It was very sad but I suppose it was all for the best. The doppelganger’s body was left in the roast beef room, which is what I think he would have wanted.
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February 14, 2010