This guy really hates games

I was cruising through a long list of board game related videos last night, and it's surprising how dull most of them are.  But THIS guy named BrewStew just nails it.  Here are two parts of an angry cartoon dude ripping on all the board games he grew up with.  Part 1 and Part 2.

No, he doesn't hate games.  He even explains that himself at one point, I think.  What he does do is point out the fundamental flaws and exploits of about a dozen popular games in under a minute each, with foul language but significant flair.

Yes, those party games like Pictionary are an anxiety attack in a box for most of us.  And they are so dependent on how well you and your partner can work together or read each other's minds.  Which reminds me of this one where the Carol Burnett family try to play Charades.

Apples to Apples? all these "rate the answers" games are arbitrary and pointless.  They make no sense at all.   Everyone chooses a thing and the current judge says which thing is best, for points.  Yay.  How is that even a game?

Mouse Trap?  "Need a degree in engineering just to set it up."  The Simpsons had a fun moment with this one, too, see Treehouse of Horrors XXI.

Uno with two players?  Yeah, that's broken.  It certainly makes the Reverse cards useless.

Operation?  The cartoonist has a knack for summarizing things in just a few words, and making it memorable.  Yeah, more anxiety.  Honnnnnk.

Boggle?  "Great, let's just do some homework, that sounds like fun."  I would have spewed root beer out my nose at that one, if I had a nose at the time.

Monopoly, of course.  Yes, some players will warn other players not to trade with you, even funnier if it's your wife doing it.  I thought she's supposed to be on your side.  He has a whole other video on how two childhood friends failed so badly at Monopoly and he could always manipulate them, with a great ending about how bad a player you have to be to end up bankrupted by Luxury Tax.

Scrabble?  There's nothing like a huge mismatch between players vocabulary levels.  Like that time Homer Simpson had a rack with the letters OXIDIZE and ended up playing ID because he didn't know that was a word.

Anyway, it was a fun set of videos finding some of the core imbalances and flaws with both the games and the players.  A good change of pace from all the youtubers who are apparently afraid to have an opinion at all.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Idle Planet Miner: Selling Your Galaxy

Image
Back in Idle Planet Miner, production was starting to bog down, with crafts taking an hour apiece, and sometimes needing hundreds of items to unlock new research.  So, I figured it would be a good time to test out their "Sell Your Planet" feature, which has so many people online asking questions. These idle games can't level up through an infinite many items, so they all have this same kind of game reset mechanism.  In Idle Planet Miner, the Sell Galaxy button shows you the value of your galaxy and how many credits you will get for it.  These credits are a kind of meta currency, letting you buy new rooms for your ships, with each new room offering a different game boost.  Clicking the Sell button will show you exactly what you will lose: all planets, cash, ores, alloys, items, research.  Which sounds terrible.  But you get to keep your dark matter, your managers, your beacon buffs (though you will have to research the Beacon again to get it back on screen),...
Read more

Ancient Games Book

Image
I had a former coworker contact me to say her mom had a weird book of old games, so we met up, and it turned out to be the classic Irving Finkel "Ancient Board Games" produced by the British Museum.  Dr. Finkel is a leading expert on ancient board games, and the book covers four classics: Senet, Mehen, Hounds an Jackals and the Royal Game of Ur.  The Royal Game of Ur is one of our favorites from this era, and was one of the first games I covered in this blog series.  I was familiar with the others, but never had a decent board to play on. The book comes with a little plastic tray with four throwing sticks and 8 playing pieces for each of two colors.  In each set, one piece is larger than the others, being the "lion" in the Mehen game. After dabbling with these games for about 45 minutes, we kept having problems picking up the perfectly smooth throwing sticks, and there was no clear distinction between the flat side and rounded side, aside from the subtle shape. ...
Read more

Hounds and Jackals

Image
Continuing with the book of ancient board games, the Hounds and Jackal board is gorgeous.  Every painted crack or chip in the supposedly wooden surface added character.  The original artifacts had holes in the board, and the pieces were little carvings of hounds and jackals on pegs.  Moving chips around the board was good enough to get the feel of it.  It's a simple race game, trying to get your pieces to the top of tree and off the board first.  There were no tricky rules for the throwing sticks.  You roll, you move. Since there were a few spaces with "slides", it's hard to not feel like you're playing a scaled down Snakes & Ladders game.  Some of these game ideas really do span most of human history.  There are also a few spaces with a little cross on them, where you roll again if you land there. The game was simple, and only took about 10 minutes.  This one had the most interesting set of variations discussed on the back page, since di...
Read more