Entry 9
Left to play we know have 36 games, and 15 days remaining on the challenge. These odds are far more favourable than what we have previously thankfully.
We are both still working this week, I work in sales and so December has been a mad rush to get five weeks of work done in three weeks. We are both brain tired. I think I mentioned this in my last post quite a bit. We are unable to do thinky games this week and so we are only playing “easy” games. These are games we have played loads and know the rules inside out. Most of these are well worn games too.
Mon; Deep Sea Adventure, High Risk
Tue; A day of rest, for my brain is broken. I instead stared at the TV taking in almost zero information. I was watching MTV Cribs though, so I mean what did I miss really? Naff all I reckon.
Wed; Rummikub, Pass the Pigs, Uno Flip, Monopoly Deal
The mechanism most prevalent in this wee selection is Push Your Luck; High Risk, Deep Sea Adventure and Pass the Pigs. Generally these are games that MJ is terrible at. He always assumes he is invincible!
Deep Sea Adventure is an Oink game for 2-6 players played over three rounds. You are divers heading into the deep to pick up treasure, trouble being each bit of treasure you take uses up some of the group air. And slows you down, thus making it a race to get back up top. And the greedier you are, the more likely you are to kill everyone including yourself. Which is of course what MJ does. Tries to kill us all. True to form, MJ didn’t manage to make it back to the submarine with any booty. He died three times out of three, so victory for Blacknell!
In High Risk, you are rolling custom dice and moving your climbers up the mountain. You can choose to re-roll some of your dice, but if at any point you roll only lightning bolts, which by the way make up half the d6 faces, then your highest climber falls. This is a dice roller, and as such I really suck. MJ pushed his luck, he fell and yet he still managed to win. Sometimes the tortoise loses the race.
Pass the pigs is one of my all time favourite games, and it is one of the only games that absolutely everyone loves. Regardless of age, gender or degree of sobriety, there are none who do not enjoy the frenzy of tossing a pair of pigs and counting up the points for the positions they land in. You keep scoring points until you chicken out or until you throw one spotted side and one blank side, known as a “pig out”. Shout that into the face of all who throw her. The winner is the first to score 100 points. In our game of Pass the Pigs I took an absolutely crushing defeat after throwing a “Makin’ Bacon”. This is the most undignified position to throw, whereby the two piggies are touching when they land. Throwing such a rude thing results in you going back to zero. I threw this whilst on 98 points. All the way back to zero, handing MJ victory. Absolutely devastated.
Don’t worry though, I pulled it back. Smashed it at Rummikub, a great family pattern making tile laying and moving game. I have played hundreds of games of this. We used to play this on holiday every night. Until we could no longer see the difference between the black and the blue tiles or the orange or the red. You lay numbered tiles out from your stand creating sets of the same numbers, but different colours, or runs of numbers in the same colour. The aim is to try and be the first to get rid of all your tiles. But the interesting part is you can not only add to the tiles already down, but also rearrange them completely in a complicated feat of mental rejigging of the pieces already down. It is fabulous to win with a complex reorganisation move.
Since there aren’t many games, I can tell you about them all I guess. Uno Flip play comes with a bit of singing. Although I will warn you there is a mild swear! Uno is a great family card game of matching colours and numbers to get rid of all your cards first. Uno Flip, unsurprisingly turns the game on its head. This version contains double sided cards, with the standard red, green, blue and yellow on one side. But there are added flip cards, where you flip your hands and decks over to the unseen side, with a cry of “Flip b*tch, get out the way”, an in my mind better version of the Ludacris classic. On the other side, there are nastier cards in turquoise, orange, pink and purple. These nasty cards include a colour change card where you keep picking up until you get one of the chosen colour. Could be one card, could be twenty one. This game lasts longer than regular uno, but it's more unpredictable and it earns its place on our shelves.
Bringing up the rear is Monopoly deal. This is an excellent game unlike the name suggests. This game is all over in 15 mins, and it is a simple draw two cards, play three. Your quest is simple, collect three full sets of properties. The journey is full of property stealing and swapping. There are consent cards to try to fight back against any nasty cards chucked your way though. These “Just Say No” cards are few and far between but there are just enough in the deck to wreck your villainous plan.