Update Finished. Game Night = Awesome.

So, yeah. Game Night with my sister. That's a new experience.

We started with a game of Flux, as I have previously enumerated. Cards went flying, rules were questioned and questioned again, and there always seemed to be a Rules Reset (that brought it back to the basic "draw 1, play 1" mechanic) RIGHT BEFORE MY DANGED TURN. Maybe I wanted to draw 5 or play 3, eh? No, drawing and playing extra is too good for the likes o' me. I have to be boring and traditional.

Anyway. Michelle won the first one due to a grievous misplay on my part. (I had forgotten she could play multiple cards, and had both Keepers she needed to win in her hand! Pardon me!) The second one took much longer, and technically nobody won, as the card Zombie Apocalypse was played, ending the game instantly if there are more than five zombies out and everyone has at least one...but by dint of the fact that through considerable effort, Michelle had acquired seventeen zombies by game's end, she was declared the winner again, if for no other reason than she was the leader of the biggest zombie cult ever.

So we went on to play another game called Citadels. This was an intriguing game where the object was to build a city from the ground up, and there were a variety of roles - Assassin, Wizard, Warlord, Bishop, Architect, Merchant, even King - that had special powers and swapped places every turn. The Assassin always went first and named a character to be "assassinated." I say named a character, because the choosing of characters was a secret process, and thus the Assassin couldn't deliberately target a player without outside information. Nevertheless, due to a combination of astounding bad luck and probably a little malice on the part of some of our co-players, my girlfriend was assassinated I believe six times over the course of the game. This was probably about half to one-third of the amount of rounds we played, so she spent a lot of time sitting out. It was all in good humor, anyway.

But this predicament was nothing compared to the saga of the Queen. See, there were eight players and nine profession cards. At the beginning of each round, the keeper of the Crown (not necessarily the King - it's complicated) would pick out one card at random that would not be available for selection. He would then pick one and pass left, and so on and so forth. It was considered highly disadvantageous to be sitting to the right of the Crowned person, as that meant you had last pick, and that would almost certainly be the Queen, the most useless character. (Her special power was dependent on her sitting next to the King, which pretty much never happened.) But due to the random nature of the game, the spot to the right of the Crown never remained in one place for long, right?

Wrong. One among us got the Crown early on, and through a series of random incidents (I don't believe he's skilled enough to fake this) managed to pick out the King to be removed from play that round every round for a good long while. If nobody chose the King, then the Crown remained in one place. This caused a great deal of consternation to the person sitting on the Crowned person's right, as he was always stuck with the Queen. It became a kind of running gag, as he would bemoan his fate each time the King card was revealed to be removed. We called him "Queen-Boy," just to twist the knife. Fun fun.

Despite having never played the game before, and never having played a similar game before, and having no idea what was actually going on most of the time, my sister Michelle managed to win by a single point. Dumb beginner's luck. I wasn't even close; my problem with those sorts of games is I always get stuck on the track to victory and never actually manage to achieve, y'know, victory. A good example is another game, Pirate's Cove. The way to win in that game is to accumulate Victory Points, which you can get from defeating other players or special cards, but which you mainly get from burying treasure at Treasure Island. If you can manage to build a strong ship early on, you can dominate all others and take all the treasure for yourself, as nobody else can possibly stand up to you. My problem was that I always got hung up on the "build a strong ship" phase and never quite got around to the "bury treasures to actually freaking win" phase. So I ended the game with a powerful ship, but many points behind the actual winner. Always happens.

That game was piles of fun. Lots of laughs all around. When we were finished with that, some of us regrouped for another game called...well, I don't remember, it was a complicated name. The gist of it was that we were all goblins running around the study room of a powerful undead wizard called Rigor Mortis. We created mischief and teleported around and smacked into each other. If we incurred Mortis's wrath, he'd slap us with a Withering Look which resulted in a curse - a physical curse. Say, you could not say three words that were chosen by the other players. Or you had to keep your teeth clenched while talking. Or you had to stand on one foot with your other knee bent. And so on, and so forth. There was an object to the game, and a way to win, but frankly, I don't remember what it was. None of us cared. It was more fun messing with the other players and digging up interesting curses. Some of these had quite entertaining combinations.

Near the end of a particular game, Vic had to keep a card balanced on her head (someone else let her borrow a hat, which sort of ruined the point) and had to keep her chin pinning a curse card card to the table, Michelle couldn't say three chosen words; all of them, unfortunately, unprintable in this rather sanitized blog. No, wait, one of them was "cute." One among our number...I believe his name was Chris...had to keep a curse card pinned between his forearms, mostly immobilizing his arms. Two among us had curses that forced them to shout an embarrassing phrase whenever a certain action occurred; being as we were near a table of hostile Magic players, these phrases were "I hate Magic players!" and the second, when we got more bold, were "Magic players are flaming homos!" The first passed among the gamers without a flicker, the second at least turned some heads. When their game had finished, they made several disparaging comments about our loudness, to which we returned that that was how the game was played, thank you very much, we were here first, and if they didn't like it they could move.

As for myself? Not too hard. I had to thump the table with my elbow whenever anyone said "screwed," I had to keep a curse card pinned between my knees while seated (not as hard as you might think), and I had to keep my mouth open at all times. This makes it hard to talk, as well as swallow. I had to talk with a thumb between my teeth to enunciate properly, or else gargle my words out like a walrus on Novocaine. And you have no idea how dry your lips get after a while of not closing your mouth. Sticking my tongue out and closing my lips around it was deemed an acceptable solution, but it caused Michelle to laugh uncontrollably and take pictures with her cell phone camera. Damn everything.

After a few rounds of that, some of us got started playing Fury of Dracula. That's a cool game based off of the original Bram Stoker novel that pits the four characters (Van Helsing, Lord Godalming, Mina Harker, and Dr. Seward) against Dracula himself, attempting to track him down among the many cities of Europe. Gameplay progressed with time, the times of night and day marking the turns (three turns each for day and night). The hunters would go from city to city and try and find Dracula. He would try to evade us. He did leave a trail, but he was a slippery devil, he was. Requires a lot of complex thought and intrigue.

The dark, thoughtful tenor of the game was rather ruined when we began to realize the inherent difficulties with the gameplay. For one thing, since night and day were each three sections, each one logically took four hours. A character could conceivably take a train from Madrid to Paris, and have time to search the City of Lights by himself for any trace of Dracula's presence or even trail, in a single four-hour chunk of time. And now that I think about it, since our characters moved every turn, when did they sleep? Moving like Wally West* on a caffeine bender around the cities of Europe and searching entire cities faster than a team of investigators could search a large building is implausible enough, but doing it all while sleep-deprived? It's a good thing for the population of late-nineteenth-century Europe that we turned our amazing powers towards the eradication of evil. We could conceivably have darted around the continent, deposing rulers at lightning speeds, and named ourselves kings and queen within, oh, two or three days at the most.

So, this has gone on long enough. And that was the last game we played anyway. I'm tired, and I'm sorry it's so late, but...I'm tired.

And the Luke-Approved YouTube Link of the Day? Well, lessee what we got here, eh...*rummages* Ok. Here we go. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pje1Ebc5v0 It's an old Chuck Jones short called Now Hear This, no doubt one of the oddest pieces of animation ever conceived. It's especially odd in that it contains one spoken word ("QUIET!!!"), and the rest is all clever sound effects and music. I can't do it justice. You'll just have to watch it.

*Wally West being, of course, The Flash.

REPLIES.

Steve: Thank you. And we do mesh well. It helps, y'know, having known each other for nearly two decades. We know how to interact correctly. Yes, the twist in Futurama was somewhat predictable, but what's this about Kovacs? Him? Coming with us? I can't stand for this calumny. You know my feelings about Kovacs. I'll fling him onto the highway at eighty miles an hour and double back just to run him over three or four times, thou knowest I will.

Matt: Certainly an option, althought not a tenable one in our Elf vs. Goblin matchup, being as it's blue and that's not in either of our colors.

Vic: Well, I get caught up in my narratives. What's that, wark? I can't dignify that seahorse comment with a serious answer (how does breathing underwater help me conquer Mexico?!?), and, well, extenuating circumstances. <3

Daniel: Suuuure you did. Yeah, that's not totally covering for not thinking of anything witty at all, nope, not in the slightest. j/k

Steve: Quiet, you.

Mom: It's because I've barely used the capabilities of Library West before now, so I felt no need to mention it. And it's perfectly open to the public, you just need an ID to check stuff out. Also, I'm kind of behind on my New Testament readings...but I get what you're saying. I don't think I was being flippant, just assuming that his powers extended as far as he wished.

???: Who exactly are you? Are you my mother again, continuing her previous comment? Or...what? I'm confused.

Bye.