10 Boardgames You Need to Play Right Now, You Stupid Monopoly Monkey, Part 2

Part 1 is here.

We begin our lesson with a clear table, a clear mind, and a crapload of games you just got by blowing the kids' college fund on Amazon. They'll get over it. Like all great sensei through the ages, I begin by robbing you of all that binds you to the past; I sweep you clean, creating a tabula rasa upon which I may scribe the new you.

So, no dice.

Also, no board.

That's right: we start our list of Board Games You Need to Play Right Now with a card game, bitches. Did I just blow your mind?

1) Bohnanza


3-5 players, simple enough for the whole family to play, homicidal green bean on the box cover. Play it, live it, love it. You're supposed to be planting rows of beans or something, but they're crazy German beans, and it doesn't matter anyway, because what matters is that the core gameplay mechanics are solid as steel. There have been a bazillion expansions and variations, but they all play roughly the same: you will find yourself learning simple (if slightly strange) rules, cards will be flung about the table, beans will be stacked and grouped and planted, and then shortly thereafter you will be having insane amounts of fun, and you won't quite be able to point to why. I'll give you a hint: it's not the cartoon beans. It's because you've started playing the kind of game where they print the name of the designer above the title.

That's right, children: in some countries, they actually design their games. Some of those designers are so good, I'll buy a game sight unseen if it's got their name on it. It's a lot like having a movie with a director: they're not all good, but it at least creates a chance that the experience won't suck completely.

Unlike, say, anything Milton Bradley publishes.

Buy it here.

2) Carcassonne


Okay, still no board, and no dice, but let's take those cards and upgrade them into cardboard tiles. I'll also let you have some pieces, but I will not hesitate to take them away if I feel you're abusing the privilege.

2-5 players, still simple enough for all but the youngest players, you're building a city in medieval Europe, blahblahblah. Or, if you prefer, you can be hunting mammoths and shit. Ultimately, it really doesn't matter, because again, we're talking solid core gameplay mechanics. It's a topography/territory grabbing game, not unlike Go in some respects, but you don't need to worry your pretty little head about that. Just play, and thank me later. Or send money. You know what? Just send the money.

Buy it here.

3) Ticket to Ride


That's right! I'm letting you have a board. Still no dice, though. You could do all kinds of harm to yourself. This game is all about laying train tracks across the United States; you can also get the sequel, which lets you do it across Europe. Or Switzerland, or Norway, or you can get the Super Train Nerd version. Whatever floats your boat. 2-5 players, insanely easy to learn, very hard to master, and will have you at your friends' and family's throats in no times because they cut you out of Pittsburgh. You're welcome.

Buy it here.

4) Pandemic


YOU WILL HAVE DICE WHEN YOU CAN SNATCH THEM FROM MY HAND AND NOT A MOMENT BEFORE! Do you think you can take me? Do you?

Well, alright then. Moving on.

Allow me to introduce you to a little thing called a co-op game. That's right: you don't get one winner when you play this game. You all win, or you all lose, together. Given that it's about saving the world from a global pandemic of... well, everything, that makes a great deal of sense. It also makes for an entirely different, and very, very fun, gameplay dynamic. Don't get me wrong: competition, and the resulting resentment, can be fun and even healthy, but sometimes you want to do things as a team, especially when you're playing with your family. Also, I can say from personal experience that it just plain gets boring winning all the time. This way, I am still be the smartest and prettiest person in the room, but I'm lauded for it instead of resented.

Well, maybe lauded and resented.

I can live with it.

Amazon doesn't seem to stock Pandemic. Buy it at your local game store, or here.

5) Puerto Rico


You don't even miss the dice any more do you? I didn't think so.

Okay, now we're hitting the big leagues. This is the first game on this list you'll have to play a couple times before you really get the hang of it. But you will love it. Every nongamer I've gotten to sit through their first game of this has been frothing at the mouth for their second. Hell, my sister loves this game.

It's about growing stuff on plantations in Puerto Rico and shipping it back to the Old Country, but by this point you know better than to care about stuff like that, right? You want to know about how you get to pick one "job" a turn, and that determines what everyone does that turn, only you get to do it better, because you picked the job. And then the next player picks the Ship's Captain, and everything ships before your corn was ready, and you reach across the table and tear their throat out with your hands, and for the first time in your life, you know what it means to be alive, really alive, manslaughter charges be damned, and no jury would convict you anyway, because they picked Ship's Captain and you would have had, like eight corn ready to go in just one more turn.

That bittersweet, coppery taste in your mouth? That's probably blood. But underneath that? That's the taste of fun.

And it only gets better from here.

Oh, and buy it here.

-- The Prolix Wag
Touch that Construction Hut token and I will rip your arm clean off. I swear it.

10 Boardgames You Need to Play Right Now, You Stupid Monopoly Monkey, Part 1

Most Americans think of boardgames as kid stuff, or at best, teenage-geek-boy-stuff (re: RISK). One could blame them, but, philistines that they are, they are not really at fault. They have been raised to think that Monopoly is a good game. When, in fact, Monopoly is not a game at all. It is a dice-rolling exercise created by Satan to spread human misery and strife.

I thrive on the taste of human souls. Tee hee!

First created in 1904 (under the name "The Landlord Game"), sales of Monopoly really took off during the Depression, probably because people needed imaginary soul-crushing despair and boredom to distract them from the real soul-crushing despair and boredom all around them.

Every game of Monopoly ever played has gone like this:

1) Yay! We're going to play Monopoly. I hope I get to be the racecar!

2) People are buying stuff. How exciting!

3) I just passed go and collected $200. How gratifying!

4) Most of the stuff has been bought. Things are really heating up!

5) Someone landed on someone else's stuff. The owner of said stuff has now started winning.

6) They're winning more.

7) Huh. They're still winning.

8) Yep. Still winning.

9) I'm going to go get a snack. Let me know if they stop winning while I'm gone.

10) Yeah, sorry. Mom called while I was in the kitchen. I kinda got into the conversation. Did you know my little cousin Kevin is going to college this Fall? Isn't that crazy? What? Two hours? Really? Well, thanks for playing my piece for me. Are they still winn--? Wow. They still are. I guess I'll... sit down and... play, then.

11) Dear Diary: Just passed Go again. My fingers are numb. Tell Laura I love her.

12) JESUS CHRIST WILL THE MADNESS NEVER END? WILL WE NEVER SEE THE DAWN!?!

13) Oh, look at that. They won.

14) Honey, I want a divorce.

Feverish delusions of apophenia aside, there is no goddamn strategy to Monopoly. There is no actual decision-making on the part of the players. There is the illusion of such ("Railroads are a good deal! Utilities are a bad deal! I feel just like Sun Tzu!"), but let's face it, it all comes down to the dice. Monopoly is essentially Craps, except without the glamor, and you can't buy a hooker with the proceeds if you win. The only important decision you ever make is which piece to play. As we all know, you should always go with race car or terrier, and never shoe, thimble, or hat.

The retarded monopoly pieces.

Compounding this is the gameplay dynamic outlined above, where you can predict the winner of a given Monopoly game approximately thirteen hours before the end. If someday you try to design a game to produce the opposite of fun, good luck doing better. The thought that such an inelegant, un-fun artistic abortion even exists gives game designers the shivers. The fact that most Americans consider it a game at all drives most of them to deep despair. The thought that it has sold bazillions of copies, and that many people actually play it on a regular basis, drives many of them to suicide.

Oh, quick side note for those semi-geeks out there who are feeling all superior about playing RISK instead: RISK is the same thing, only you can see who's going to win as soon as they pick Australia.

"Hm. Can I win by attacking Kamchatka, or Yakutsk? Oh, that's right: I've already lost. I'm playing RISK!"

Other countries, especially Germany for some reason, are under no such delusions. They know a good game when they see one. They play games that are games, by god, and they have fun doing it. They play them at all ages, in all social settings, and their lives are richer for it. Some of us have plumbed the depths of these foreign gaming cultures, and have come back with forbidden lore that can save us all from crap like Monopoly. There are worlds undreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio, and you and your family could be having fun in them on a Thursday night. Tomorrow, I shall lay out for you a list of such treasures.

Until then, go to your closet, get down your Monopoly board, take it out in the back yard, and burn it. You'll not only feel better; you'll be a better human being.

-- The Prolix Wag
Candyland? CANDYLAND?!? I swear to god, if you weren't three, I would smack you in the mouth for even saying that word.

Shiner Bock is My Master Now

Swear to everloving god I came up with the title before I found this. God bless you, interwebs.

I am a beer snob. I am a big believer in the twin principles that a) there are brews that are as complex and rewarding to the palate as the finest vintage of wine, and b) mocking crappy American beer is not only my birthright, it is a moral imperative.

The difference between a beer drinker and a beer snob is that a beer drinker values "drinkability" while a beer snob values "what I'm drinking not sucking".

Now, the decision of certain beer marketers made a little while back to start pushing "drinkability" is a pretty brilliant one, because a) most Americans are beer drinkers, not beer snobs, and b) what they're selling is, in fact, drinkable as all get-out.

It wasn't until my friend Jason pointed it out to me that I got why, though: (most) Americans want a beer they can drink vast quantities of without actually noticing because they don't drink to enjoy what they're drinking, they drink to get drunk.

While I'm not opposed to getting drunk, necessarily, I like to point out that the way to get drunk in an intellectually honest way is to pound shots, or (for the more classically minded) swill moonshine from a Mason jar. You drink "beer" like Bud/Coors/Miller/et. al. because you want to get hammered, and you haven't got the stones to admit it to yourself until you've had a few.

I would like to make an exception for a little thing called "BL Lime" I discovered at a Beer-themed Amusement Park (tm) earlier this summer. It's refreshing, delicious, and will get you drunk if you drink enough of it. Of course, it's not actually beer. It's a lime-and-beer flavored alcoholic soda. Which is actually pretty awesome.

I can drink this, because it's not actually beer.

When it comes to drinking at home, however, I will stick to my snobby microbrews and imports, thank you very much. The title of this post refers to the fact that I went to undergrad in Texas, and thus have the command "drink Shiner Bock" imprinted on the small lizard part of my brain. I just found a local liquor store that stocks it at reasonable prices; I will be opening a tab with them soon, just like I did at that other purveyor of addictive substances, Rita's Water Ice.

A special note before I go to people who thing Yuengling is "good beer" (here's looking at you, Nate): I did my grad work near Philadelphia, where Yuengling flows like water, and the novelty quickly wears off. You should know: That is not good beer. That is Bud with a brunette dye job. The fact that they have the nerve to stick the words "Black and Tan" on the side of the bottle is pretty clearly a violation of at least three different articles of the Geneva Convention. Go buy yourself a six-pack of Spaten, or anything by Sam Adams, and live, for once.

-- The Prolix Wag
Because condescension is the new black.

Don't Cry for Me, Alaska...

The thing that amazes me about Sarah Palin's rambling, incoherent resignation announcement isn't the fact that she up and resigned out of nowhere, or the fact that she pretty much told everyone that any governor who serves out his term is doing their state a deep disservice (???), or the fact that she is still deeply devoted to her own victimhood, or the fact that she's still falling back on what she excelled at in High School.

No, what amazes me most is the fact that pretty much no one in the media seems interested in pointing out just how little sense she made. I mean, good lord:

My choice is to take a stand and effect change - not hit our heads against the wall and watch valuable state time and money, millions of your dollars, go down the drain in this new environment. Rather, we know we can effect positive change outside government at this moment in time, on another scale, and actually make a difference for our priorities - and so we will, for Alaskans and for Americans.

Look, I can understand a little bit of healthy American populist anti-intellectualism, but that MAKES NO DAMN SENSE WHATSOEVER. Many politicians manage to talk a lot and say nothing, but I've never seen one abandon the rules of conventional grammar so completely to do it. And not get called on it.

I dunno, I'm just remembering back to the election, and how it was somehow not okay to point out the fact that this woman is stupid. I mean, not-quite-ready-for-city-council stupid. Dumber-than-Dan-Quayle stupid. And that she was as close as you can get to being the Vice President of this country and not get it.

Of course, we went through eight years of the same thing with our actual President, but let's not get into that. And, to be fair, she is stupider than he is.

-- The Prolix Wag

I’m not an elitist; I just – okay, okay. I’m totally an elitist.