Sliiiiiiide!!

 

The other night in our new apartment my roommate and I had our first power outage thanks to those fun summer thunderstorms. We lit candles, cracked a few windows to escape the heat, and then realized we had nothing to do. So we turned to the top of the fridge where the only two board games we own were sitting: Star Wars Episode 1 Monopoly and Sorry!. Seeing as how Sorry! had less things to read in the darkness, we chose to play that.

An hour's worth of game-playing commenced. Sorry! is an easy game for children, sure, but playing as an adult gives you the added feature of trash-talking your opponent. Simply by selecting our colors I was able to amp up the anger:
"What color do you want to be?"
Roommate: "Blue."
"I wanted to be Blue."
"Fine, I'll be Green."
"It's dark in here, why don't you pick a color that doesn't look incredibly similar to my color?"
"YELLOW THEN."

It was on.

I had to explain to the roomie how when you land on another player's piece you bump them back to their Start and say "Sorry!". There was some coaching I had to do ("It's not just Sorry!, it's more of a playground-taunt sound: Sooorrreeeee!!!".) but eventually we got to an angry, sneering place. If you need a frame of reference, I will always recommend the family sketch from The Carol Burnett Show ("sliiiiiide"). Oh we had our fun.

Did you watch that clip? It's 15 minutes, but seriously let's appreciate the beauty of Carol Burnett's insane energy and Vicki Lawrence's stone-faced quipping as Mama. Her face after Eunice screams "IT WAS A SEVEN!!!!"? Kills me. And then the venom barely contained in Mama's, "Eunice appears to be of the opinion that it was a seven." That's just gold.

Sorry! was a game I played often as a kid at my grandma's house, although luckily she wasn't half the bitch Mama was. I liked a lot of board games as a child. There was Kerplunk, the game that had something to do with marbles but the real task for child Isaac was not to swallow them. There was Mall Madness, a game to teach teens how to NOT own a credit card as an adult. Guess Who?, the game with all the flippy people and you had to ask questions about who your opponent was. Fun fact, there were only five women in Guess Who? so if the first question was "are you a woman?" and you were, chances were good you were going to lose. I think this was some sort of commentary by Milton Bradley on the unfairness of the sexes, but ten-year-old me just liked the clicking sound the board made.

Your classic murder board games were fun. There was Clue and all it's many different interpretations. Then VHS Clue. You guys remember VHS Clue? It was a videocassette you put in your VCR and it showed scenes of a small movie version of Clue (not the Tim Curry one, a lower-budget one). It was campy as all hell and me (and others in my generation) loved to simply sit and watch it without playing the game. Col. Mustard had a metal plate in his head that magnetized bullets and knives, which got him fired from spy work. That's beautiful stuff.

The not-as-popular 13 Dead End Drive also revolved around solving a murder and "bumping off" your opponents. Years later my generation would be told that video games like Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto were too violent. Shit, board games were getting violent at that point. People were killing each other with candlesticks. That's got to be messy.

Just a game about a bunch of heirs killing each other over a will. Ages 9 and up.

Anyway, after a close game of Sorry! (I won by a hair) we moved the candles to the kitchen table to play a few rounds of Gin. Gin Rummy has become my go-to two-person card game when you need to pass the time (like when you're working during a Shakespearean tragedy). The first game my roommate won four hands in a row and totally schooled me. So we set up for a second game. I began to play hard ball: I payed extra attention to what she was picking up and what she was laying down. With no electricity to distract me I was in a good place and I bested her in the next game.

Card-playing is in my blood, probably because I grew up in West Virginia. In high school, no matter what "clique" you looked at chances were good at least 3 tables in the lunch room had a game of Euchre going at some point. My junior year me and my fellow band nerds would play it constantly. I don't recall winning, but we had our fun.

I also played a lot of Pinochle with my family. Pinochle is a bit of an old person's game, right up there with Bridge. My grandparents, aunts, and cousins would all play it regularly at family events and I eventually weaseled my way in to playing with them. Pinochle is no joke; it's hard as fuck. And my Pap was terrific at it. He was aware of every card that was laid down, to the point where he'd start telling you what to play ("Lay down your Queen of Spades."). When he started forgetting names and things in his final years it was as sad as an athlete who wasn't allowed to play anymore.

Anyway the power is back on and computer games are getting attention again. But I can appreciate nature's occasional interruption for some board game nostalgia. I like games like this more than things like Cards Against Humanity. To me the conversations and snarkiness that come while playing a seven-hour game of Monopoly are more entertaining than a cheap Helen Keller joke. Although sometimes the snarkiness gets too intense and crankiness ensues, like the one time during a game of Spoons when I hit my sister in the face with a spoon. Fun was not had for the whole family that night.