Sorry for not posting in a while. The usual excuses apply - kid, work, projects, writing, working out, etc… Actually doing stuff is stopping me from documenting that stuff. I would hire a minstrel to follow me around recording my adventures in song but that’s super expensive and, besides, the last guy killed himself out of boredom:
“Oohhh, now harken to the tale of a man in a cube.
He stared out the window for thirty minutes and two.Um… He heated up his lunch and then answered his mail…Then he filed some paperwork… Uh… Wassail!
You get the idea. I guess I could post a never-ending stream of pics of our cat - this is the Internet, after all. Oh, yeah, we have a cat now. His name is Rocket. He is orange and white. He’s a rescue. He’s the cutest widdle thing I ever did see! Yesh, he is! Yesh, he issss! Who’s a cutey-patootie? That’s right! You are! Whassa boody poody misser kitty cat?
Ahem… that is… Go Seahawks! [Whispers: More on the cat in another post.]
To the real point of this post, now. How do you tell your five-year-old that his idea for a board game, for lack of a better word, sucks? There he is, breathlessly going over the paragraph-length rules of each and every one of the, like, twelve thousand thumbnail-sized spaces of his creation - four sheets of sloppily taped together printer paper with a huge meandering, incomprehensible loop on it - when I realize that all of a sudden the noise has stopped.
“Oh… What?”, I said, blinking my eyes back into focus.
“I said ‘Do you want to play my board game with me?’”, he said. “I think it’s pretty good. Maybe we could sell it.”
So what do you say? I am pretty sure the correct response is not “Pfft, no. You’re wrong, it’s terrible. I mean, pretty much every other completely illegible square is either some kind of instant death or Go Back to Start. Unless you are trying to market some artsy metaphor about the futility of existence or something you may want to reconsider the playability of this thing. Also, who the hell taught you how to use Scotch tape? It looks like a stroke victim with ADD assembled this while in the middle of a seizure. Now quit crying and get me another beer.”
I’m not sure what the correct response is. If this was the first one he did, then "Sure, let's do it!" would be appropriate. Maybe even for the second. But this was about the fifth one. He clearly wants to create something fun, he wants to share it with others, and he wants to make a little extra scratch on the side. There is no part of that I disapprove of.
The “storm” last week kept him out of school for three days we needed something constructive to do while warming up in between bouts of sledding, building a snow fort, collecting icicles, and doing other outdoorsy stuff like suffering from hypothermia and cursing under our breath.
Perfect excuse for a project. Why not make a board game? It had to be simple, playable, and made from the stuff we had on hand. Whether it was fun to play or not was fairly subjective and totally unimportant.
I had a 16 x 16 inch piece of oak plyboard and forty poplar dowel disks in the garage leftover from an abandoned checkerboard project... stupid local hardware store didn't have red paint of any kind in quantities less than half a gallon. I also had a set of gaming dice (shut up) that I figured would come in useful. We grabbed the craft box, some construction paper, the BoogieBoard, and my sketchbook and the family got to work.
"Okay. First thing's first. What should we name our game?"
"Umm.. Zizzy!" he said.
"Uh... Ok, 'Zizzy' it is. What kind of game is Zizzy? Should it be a..."
"Wait! Let's call it 'Zombieland'. You know, like Candyland but with zombies."
"Maaaannnn... This stupid decade," I thought to myself. Out loud, I said "Ok, sure, 'Zombieland' it is. Let's stick with that. Choose some sheets of construction paper and cut out some shapes. Make them kind of big because we are going to have to write on them."
As we cut out the shapes we hashed out what some of the spaces would say. The wife was insistent that one of the shapes should be a heart. That took a little thought but, in the end, think it turned out to be one of the more interesting spaces on the board.
Thirty-six of the poplar pieces became magical amulets that could repel zombies and the other four became tokens. The gaming dice were replaced with standard red and white dies. A crocodile-filled moat and island were created and two bridges and a leaky raft were thrown into the mix. Some artwork was printed out and glued to the poplar pieces and voila - two two-hour days and it was time to play.
Each person starts out with four zombie-repelling amulets and the goal is to be the last to die. Sort of like Monopoly. I tried to make sure that the rules and spaces were set up so that, statistically, people would run out of amulets and the game would be over somewhat before the heat death of the universe. This makes the game very much unlike Monopoly, hence its appeal.
The first two two-player games went as planned. The boy won once and I won once. The games were about 30 minutes long. Sweet. Great balance. Let's get mommy and see what a game with three people is like.
Sigh. About 90 minutes in, we discovered that with three (or more, probably) people that the game turned into a never ending merry-go-round of trading amulets back and forth. It was time for several rule changes. Not everyone agreed with some of the changes and good points were made on all sides like "That's stupid" and "Well, I think your idea is stupid" and in the end it was decided that a manual was needed to prevent future friction.
Two hours later a manual was created and a coat of sealant was added to the pieces and the board and now we have a shockingly playable game, albeit one with, like, the least-inspired-sounding name imaginable. We are probably treading on any number of copyright laws even using it, but, hey, we're rebels like that.
I was going to post the text of the believe-it-or-not-four-page manual but this article is way too long as it is. Tell you what... I'll add it anyway. You can check it out if you like after the alleged jump break below. Enjoy!
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