GET NEW POSTS VIA FEED
OR EMAILBoard Games That Scarred Me For Life
Monopoly
Lesson learned: Capitalism is evil.
I have a depressing childhood memory of playing Monopoly with a friend and running out of money. I wanted to quit but my buddy kept lending me cash - a little bit at a time - which I would instantly lose in the next few moves. He basically had ownership of the entire board. The result is a complete phobia of debt which persists to this day.
Wikipedia: Monopoly
Life
Lesson learned: Conform or die.
No relation to the cereal or the cellular automation, this board game presents a journey along the path of life which means getting married and having kids. I once drove my younger brother to tears because at the age of six, getting in a car with a girl and bearing children is the grossest thing imaginable. But those are the rules of this socialization masquerading as a kid’s game - you have get married to win. I believe this game must be updated to include gay marriage, single parents, and a Prius.
Wikipedia: Life
Dungeons and Dragons
Lesson learned: If your leader sucks, you’re screwed.
For a time around junior high, various role-playing games were in vogue, but there was one common denominator: if your GM had no idea what they were doing, the entire game came to a standstill. One GM was so unorganized he announced he was quitting mid-game - and opened a portal to Gamma World.
Wikipedia: Dungeons and Dragons
Top Secret
Lesson learned: Luck trumps skill.
My wayward journey into role-playing games hit a low point when firing a gun at point-blank range into an opponent. The odds of a miss were one out of a hundred. Two rolls of a ten-sided die resulted in a miss. I argued with the GM regarding the impossibility of missing when firing a gun at point blank range. I live forever with the crushing thought that even with overwhelming odds in your favor, you can still get screwed.
Wikipedia: Top Secret
Supremacy
Lesson learned: World politics is confusing and boring.
This game was highly rated in Games magazine, so my parents bought it for my brothers and I. Unfortunately, we never got a handle on the complex rules involving nations, trade, resources, and weapons - like a hopped-up version of Risk for readers of the Economist. But all we wanted to do was hurl nukes at each other and use the laser satellites. The end result was pieces lost, a board game relegated to the linen closet, and a general disinterest in voting throughout my twenties.
Wikipedia: Supremacy
D-Day
Lesson learned: War is hell.
The Avalon Hill games were exacting recreations of World War II, down to every deployed unit represented by a rectangular chit with numbers on it. Unfortunately, the set up alone was a freaking nightmare, taking days to put every piece in the right historically accurate position before you could begin playing. If a handful of pieces were lost, the entire game was pointless. However, by its sheer complexity, the invasion of Normandy was accurate in one important regard: war is hell and I never wanted to experience it again.
Wikipedia: D-Day
Operation
Lesson learned: Irrational fear of doctors.
The game so scary it was returned to box and the closet, never to be opened again. You had to pull white objects out of a scared naked man using a pair of tweezers. If your tweezers touched the edges of the hole, a buzzer sounded and the guy’s nose would light up. There are so many things wrong with this game from the perspective of a child - the naked guy, the nose, the buzzer, the tooth-white objects, and the idea of operation itself. Whoever thought this game up - may he come down with terminal Water on the Knee.
Wikipedia: Operation
Battleship
Lesson learned: If you can lie and get away with it, you still win.
Your opponent calls out a coordinate, and you call out “miss!” while sneakily repositioning the ship to a new location. I’m surely not the only one that did this. The guilt plagues me to this day.
Wikipedia: Battleship
Categories: General, Humor :: Tags: ::
Trackback URL
Front Page
Previous Post: Link Sharing: 1/24/08
Next Post: Battlestar Galactica: Bastille Day
Related Posts: Apple and Gaming :: iPod Games :: Valleywag: Once Again :: PlayStation 2 ::
"Yeah it could be the 3g or possibly the gps. Some apps may turn on the location and it remains on. But right now the battery is lasting long enough to where I'm satisfied.Interesting that you noticed sluggishness also, hope a 2.0.1 update will fix that." -
I still play D&D once a week
(actually didn’t start until pretty late in life… had the rule books but never found a good DM as a kid)
Important life lessons I’ve learned from D&D:
The most logical result of invulnerability is to become a complete asshole because no one else can do anything about it. Superman? It would never happen.
All it takes is one chaotic evil guy in the party and next thing you know everyone’s trying to use “eat the evidence” to cover up the accidental murder of the town guards. This applies to cube dwelling office politics in a way I don’t want to think about right now.
re: Operation. The modern day equivalent is trying to give your cat a pill.
Heh - now that I’ve published this article there is a theme of being a kid frustrated with overly complex rules. Which is why I now prefer video games because the computer takes care of all the tedious dice rolling and hit point calculation stuff. I’m impressed that you have the patience to play the game today - perhaps you just have an excellent DM?
Damn Jase this was one funny blog post.
Having played several of these games with you as kids, I can definitely attest to several of those lessons learned. I do think that in a lot of these games (particularly the strategy ones) the setup took longer than the actual game in some cases. In the case of another WW2 sim, Avalon Hill’s Third Reich, the instruction manual reminded me of a bad high school reading assignment - you might slog through 100 pages of prose but how much of it did you retain?
I really enjoyed that Talisman game we used to play with BJ though. As well as some of the card games which were a bit simpler.
I’ll have to agree though, as much as I like board games and pen and pencil rpgs, the computer sure as hell makes the micro management a lot easier.
haha! funny stuff. trivial pursuit was quite disturbing when i first played it. then again, it was advertised as being for 15 year olds and up; i was 10 when i first had a go. learning things like diphallasparatus is when a man has two penises perhaps wasn’t the best way to spend my childhood.