Conference hydra::dave_barry

1033.0. "Board Games - Clue, Monopoly, chess, Scrabble" by BOOKIE::chayna.zko.dec.com::xanadu::eppes (Nina Eppes) Mon Jan 27 1997 13:01

Dave Barry
January 26, 1997

OK, here's a nostalgia question: What childhood game does this remind you of?

"Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick." If you answered, "Spin
the Bottle," then I frankly do not want to know any more about your childhood.
What I'm referring to is of course the classic board game "Clue," in which you
try to solve a murder by using a logical process of deduction to narrow down
the various possibilities until your sister has to go to the bathroom, at
which point you cheat by looking at the answer cards. At least that was always
my strategy.

In Monopoly, my strategy was to be the car. The car was one of the little
metal game-board pieces; the other ones, as I recall, were the hat, the dog,
the shoe, the guy on the horse, and the iron. I never wanted to be the shoe,
and I definitely did not want to be the iron. I wanted to be the car because I
could make car noises by vibrating my lips -- brrrrmmmmm -- and drive the car
around on the floor to amuse myself while waiting my turn, which is mainly
what you do in Monopoly, which I always considered to be one of the most
boring activities on the planet.

But I had friends who LOVED it; when we played, they became insane
money-grasping capitalist pigs. They'd crouch next to the game board, looking
over the tops of their hotels with greed-crazed eyes, watching me throw the
dice, waiting for the little car to come around the corner, motoring
innocently along -- brrrrmmmmm -- until it stopped on -- HAH!! -- Boardwalk,
and they'd triumphantly announce that I owed them some huge amount of pretend
money that they knew to the exact pretend cost of landing on Boardwalk without
looking at the cards.

I'm not saying that ALL of these friends went on to become attorneys, but it
is a healthy percentage.

I will say this about Monopoly: I was better at it than at chess. My problem
with chess was that all my pieces wanted to end the game as soon as possible.
"Let's get this over with!" was their battle cry. If the rules had allowed it,
my pieces would all have charged out onto the board simultaneously the instant
the game started. Unfortunately, this was not legal, so they had to content
themselves with charging out one at a time, pretty much at random, and
immediately getting captured. Here's what they sounded like:

PAWNS: Oh no! They got the Knight!

KING: Darn it!

BISHOP: I'll go next!

KING: Good luck!

PAWNS: Oh no! They got the Bishop!

KING: Darn it!

QUEEN: I'll go next!

KING: Good luck!

PAWNS: Oh no! They got the Queen!

KING: Good! I mean, darn it!

Because of the level of my chess game, I was able -- even against a weak
opponent, such as my younger brothers, or the dog -- to get myself checkmated
in under three minutes. I challenge any computer to do it faster.

The one board game that I still play is Scrabble. I like it because, unlike
most other board games, which basically are pointless time-consumers, in
Scrabble you can do something mentally stimulating and worthwhile: make
naughty words. There is nothing quite like the sense of intellectual
accomplishment that comes from spelling out, say, "b-o-s-o-m," knowing that it
will be sitting there on the board for hours, staring up at your opponents.

The problem with Scrabble is that it leads to arguments like this:

FIRST PLAYER: . . . e, e, t. There!

SECOND PLAYER: "gleet?" What the hell is "gleet?"

FIRST PLAYER: I have no idea, but if you can use "pood," I can use "gleet."

The thing is, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, both "gleet" and
"pood" really ARE words, as are "kloof," "fremitus" and "woomera." It turns
out that, if you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a
word, which means you can put down any old letters you want and claim it's a
legal move.

Of course you have to be careful whom you're playing with. The number of
violent Scrabble-related incidents is on the rise. I have here a news item
from the Nov. 29, 1996, Hagerstown, Md., Morning Herald, sent to me by alert
readers Bill and Louisa Sonnik. Here are the first two sentences of this item,
which I am not making up:

"SMITHSBURG -- A Hagerstown woman was charged with second-degree assault on
Wednesday night after her husband was struck in the forehead with a Scrabble
game board, according to the Washington County Sheriff's Department. The
incident happened when the man tried to restrain the woman after she threw the
Thanksgiving turkey into the yard."

The item does not state why the woman threw the turkey, but I would not be
surprised to learn that a word like "gleet" had something to do with it. I
would also not be surprised if, next Thanksgiving, this couple leaves the
Scrabble board in the closet and just throws the turkey, which sounds like
more fun.