Warning: The following deals with mature subject matter such as playing board games and drinking beer and may not be suitable for boring people.
Some people think playing board games is for nerds. Well, my custom Catan board, lucky leatherbound gaming Crocs, and handcrafted resource card holder say otherwise.
I love playing games! I like chess, checkers, Monopoly, Carcassonne, Hungry Hungry Hippos… you name it, I like it. (Except backgammon, but that’s merely for personal reasons involving some distant relatives and a moose).
I especially like games when all the players are uber competitive and take it super seriously.
It’s funny that we call them games, because the way I play them, they’re more like wars. Wars that end with not nearly so many casualties and the food, of course, is much better.
For a while now I have been playing a game called Catan. I’m sure many of you out there have heard of this game.
If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a lot like a DG council meeting — vicious, cutthroat, and anywhere from two to six people take part.
Basically, you try to build an empire while destroying everyone else around you. (Boy, those analogies keep on coming).
There are only a few simple rules in Catan, such as building roads, building cities, bring your own beer and always, and I mean always, put the robber on green! I really can’t emphasize that enough.
The group I most often play with is a lot of fun. There’s something so sweet and homey about gathering around the table, cracking a few cold ones and lacerating each other with razor-sharp insults manufactured using only the most obscene and degrading language available in all of our official languages while the fire quietly flickers in the background and the beer cans slowly mound in the sink to the size of Hippie Hill.
I mean, we really get into it. The drinking, I mean.
After playing together a while, you develop your own game lingo. For instance: Jerkaholic and Raisinbrain.
There are moments of pure euphoria, intensely debated rule interpretations and plots and ploys galore. A simple look or certain “clearing-of-the-throat” can elicit hilarity.
And cunning! Lots and lots of cunning. You may not believe me, but I was once distracted during an especially fierce game by a “phantom” mouse that affected my concentration just enough to let the win slip through my fingers.
The other players actually pretended to see a mouse just behind me so I might forget where I was and pass the dice too early. Their deceit was successful and someone else won the game. (There really wasn’t any mouse).
I call those games “asterisk wins,” as in: win.*
Because sure, you won, but you had to use quite a bit of gamesmanship and bending of the rules to do so. So it’s not really a pure win, is it?
Not like when I win. I’ve been privately tracking the standings of my current playing group and here they are:
Me: 157 wins
Everyone else: 157 wins*
You can see now the importance of the asterisk.
The point I’m trying to make is that I’m really, really good and unless somebody uses dastardly tricks, you’re probably not going to beat me.
That’s why everyone always puts the robber on me. That’s why I’m always getting deserted. That’s why I can never keep harbourmaster. (Damn you blue!)
It’s the price of greatness I guess. At least, that’s what I tell myself when I’m crying in the shower after a fun night of gaming.
Ocho!
This column is dedicated to Blue, Green, Orange, White (love you!), Brown, Red, and Don.