meelie | In which brackets and board games are abused horribly

I have a great fondness for board games.

Growing up with my(idiot) brothers* I didn't get much of a chance to play a lot of them**(although 'The Game of LIFE' was always rather popular in my house. I wonder why? And also, with the new version of the game? You don't get little pink and blue pieces of plastic to represent your offspring/lose all the pieces in the carpet! That seems wrong), I got 'scattergories' and 'cluedo' for christmas very young and then had no-one to play them with. One year, I got video cluedo, due to my mother misunderstanding what cluedo is. It was very odd. I should go to my mothers and rescue it. I think it's in the cupboard under the mantle with her Shirley Bassey record(just the one) and the Dukes of Hazard read-a-long story book cassette tapes(yeeeehaw!)

My cousins had a dodgy Star Wars board game which was just a roll the dice and move setup, but it had cardboard bits representing the characters! Playing that, watching "The Blues Brothers" for the millionth time, and begging to play with their copy of "Twister" were staples of trips to my Aunts place.

So currently at my place we have a really nice scrabble set(it has a lazy susan! and wooden tiles!), Monopoly(from which

alasen is banned from playing), RISK, Lord of the Rings RISK(which has no Mordor on it. How can you play without being able to yell at someone across the board that "Mordor is WEAK!!"?) which we haven't played yet, Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit(which we also haven't played because the questions are skeery. we did however play with the ring that comes with it and pretended to be invisible and called it 'our precioussss'), my Buffy board game(which is uber-complicated to set up, has a thing which determines the phases of the moon and which you can win in a really really short time with a lucky roll. it's a very disappointing game. you're left there, having killed Buffy[or having killed the Master, The Mayor, Adam etc] thinking, 'is that it? that can't be it!' but it is and it sucks), and our most recent acquisition 'Munchkin', which is actually a card game but with a sufficient level of backstabbing and bad sportsmanship that it feels like a board game.

Anyway, this whole post was inspired by

laurakaye linking to a game she'd played called "Kill Doctor Lucky". I covet this game. I also covet a few others after having a look through their site mostly "Captain Park's Imaginary Polar Expedition". You have to fake an expedition! There is no bad there!

* that reminds me, I have a new 'my brother, the idiot' story to tell later. Maybe. If somehow I can prove that we are not related and that I do not share a gene pool with him.

** although I have vague recollections of rainy holidays down south with enforced chinese checkers and possibly a game based on Jem? Or She-Ra? Some kind of very pink board game. With lots of bits. that always got lost. And dude! at primary school there was a game based on The Cabbage Patch kids in the school library. and they had 'Mastermind', and a girl I knew had the 'Murder She Wrote' game. And I got 'Scotland Yard' secondhand when I was little but it was missing vital pieces.