Monday, March 29, 2010

today I bribed somebody to play a board game

My dorky brother wrote this. Then I copied and pasted it from marijuana.com into my blog.

Has anybody ever played Twilight Imperium?


My sister once told me how she was roped into a game of Twilight Imperium, and got so bored that she tried to lose the game, but couldn't figure out how exactly to do that. However, I am a much bigger fan of board games than my sister is, so I tried it out.

It's one of the most notoriously over-complicated board games on the market. The rulebook is over 40 pages long, it comes with several hundred cards, tokens, and plastic pieces, and it is a completely different game every time because you have to re-make the galaxy every game. I have played it constantly with my friends for the past couple of days, and we got as good as to have the board game set up within 30 minutes one time. A full game for us has taken... well we haven't played a full game yet because it takes 4 hours at least for us to get to a point where we have established at least a narrative of the game, but need to clear the table and eat like human beings again. Often this is a test of will, where the person who loses the game is the person who has to forfeit for personal or hygiene reasons.

However, it is a perfect game for me and my two fellow board-game obsessed friends. Unfortunately for us, it really is a much more fun game to play with a fourth person, even if that fourth person was promised a cash incentive and snacks from 7-11. We also told her it was like playing Puerto Rico, which was a damned dirty lie.

At around turn 8 (hour 3) she was close to falling asleep and played the game more out of a frustrated effort to be over with. I remember her smiling grimly when I told her that it had been a trap: "It's a trap!" in my best Admiral Ackbar voice.

That's when she left. As per our custom, that meant that her and her teammate (angry at having been teamed up with "the girl") had to forfeit. I was winning anyways.

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