Review: NASCAR Champions Publisher: Milton Bradley Year: 1998 Tagline: The thrilling race game of fast cars and big money.
how we met
I found NASCAR Champions on a thrifting visit where a NASCAR fan vomited their collection onto the entire store. I saw NASCAR clothing, I saw NASCAR puzzles, I saw NASCAR dishes. And there were several NASCAR games. I did not currently own any racing games, so I picked up NASCAR Champions and held on for dear life. Bill tried to talk me out of it. It was adorable.
how it plays
The object of NASCAR Champions is to make the most money after two laps of races. Then you win!
First you need to choose a car. The rules will tell you that you must always play with 5 cars and no two of them should be the same color. The game comes with two black and two blue cars, so one from each needs to be set aside.
FUN FACT: Someone on BGG asked the simple question in the forums, why 7 cars? You can only play with 5 and each must be a different color, so why 7? I think that’s a good question. User Jeremiah Lee answered it very well pointing out that the game is as much, perhaps more, for NASCAR fans than board gamers. The more cars, the more drivers, the more interest, the more purchases. Well said, Jeremiah!
Cars are placed randomly in their starting positions by shuffling the relevant DRIVER cards and drawing them one by one. First draw gets pole position (that means first)! Second gets the next spot, and so on. Now you are ready to play!
Here we are lined up and ready to rumble
The player in pole position goes first, and play continues counterclockwise.
When it’s your turn, roll all five of the dice. Then you choose 3 of them that you want to play. But here’s the trick: these dice must be played in order from lowest to highest.
The dice rolls will mostly consist of colors with a number on them. These represent the color car that you would move, and the number of spaces you would move it.
The CHECKERED FLAG sides of dice always appear greenish, like the 1 in this example, but they are not green. Don’t fall for it!
The dice also have one side with a checkered flag. These will allow you to draw a CHECKERED FLAG card if you use them. The only importance of the number on these dice is the order in which you will draw the card. Many cards in the CHECKERED FLAG deck are to your advantage.
A sampling of CHECKERED FLAG cards
If you are incredibly unhappy with your roll you can use your SHIFT GEARS card to re-roll all 5 dice. This card can be used once per lap, and its usage is shown by flipping the card upside down.
After you choose your 3 dice and put them in lowest to highest order, you follow the directions of each. It is possible for a car to be blocked and not move, so you can use that to your advantage when choosing which dice to play. Just remember they get played in order.
If a car is facing backward because of a spin or crash (some cards cause these awful things) then you can use a matching color die of any number to turn it the right way. You do not get to move it with the same die, though, just face it forward.
As soon as the first car passes the red line on the track, each player gets a SPONSOR card. This is an interesting shift in play, because you may suddenly be quietly rooting for an enemy vehicle to finish so you can collect the money. These SPONSOR cards are kept secret and last for the entire lap.
I wouldn’t say SPONSOR cards are real varied, but they do cause interesting shifts
As expected, the first car that passes the finish line gets first place, and so on. This includes any dummy cars playing too. At the end of the first lap, hand out money for finishing places as well as any successfully completed SPONSOR cards. Then move your marker chip to the spot on the outer track to represent your current score.
You track your score on the board using these chips
The second lap is only slightly different. The last place car gets pole position and so on, until the car that came in first starts out in the last position. SHIFT GEARS cards get turned up again, ready to save your butt one more time. SPONSOR cards are all returned and shuffled. The entire CHECKERED FLAG deck is also shuffled and reset.
Follow the rest of the instructions for the first lap until you have all completed the second lap. The player with the most money in total after both laps is the NASCAR Champion and the winner!
how it went
As mentioned at the outset, I did not currently own any racing games when I found NASCAR Champions. No racing games at all.
Now, sure, I know there are probably better racing games out there. The BGG comments point out a few with more strategic depth. But most of the comments are also fairly forgiving, that NASCAR Champions is not a bad one. This is high praise for an Idle Remorse game on BGG. In fact, very few people even claim ownership of the games reviewed here.
Here we are lined up for our spoils
Anyway, having little to compare, I can’t really comment on this game vs other racing games. I will tell you this, though: I was super happy to find NASCAR Champions complete and in fantastic shape for only $2.99.
We chose our cars with little regard to the racers because we aren’t really knowledgeable on NASCAR. So we chose fairly randomly, like with most pawns.
The DRIVER cards for you to look at. They don’t do much else
We did a terrible job of remembering to use our SHIFT GEARS cards. Or else we did not want to relinquish all of the dice. But it seemed even in a bad roll, it never occurred to us that we had a fix for just this thing. To the extent that I do not think a single one of us used that card during either lap. So place that card in a prominent place in front of you, lest you also forget.
I appreciated a lot of things about NASCAR Champions, even knowing little to nothing about actual NASCAR racing. Please forgive me, or better yet comment and correct me, if I go wildly off the rails as a NASCAR ignoramus.
I appreciated how you were not entirely in control of your car, and how both the environment and other players can cause your success or failure. This seems like it is at least striving to be realistic and on theme.
It is difficult to tell but the red line mentioned previously as causing SPONSOR cards to happen is in the upper right of the track
I loved how choosing 3 out of 5 dice, and then playing them in order, forces you to plan out your move. While some people may complain that this game lacks strategy, you can’t be super lazy and play. You have to show up for your turn.
I enjoyed the SPONSOR cards, and how they cause this undercurrent to your play. How suddenly you might want an enemy car to win or at least place, because then you make bank. But you still have to be cool about it.
I think you could easily tweak this game for movement programming and enjoy how the cars do not move, or slam into each other, or whatever else. Some simple house rules around all players rolling at once and programming movement might be very fun, if less thematic. I can see taking turns rolling and having each player choose a die to use, then continuing to move in order.
Keri was ahead in our game most of the time, but we had our fair share of ups and downs with SPONSOR cards, CHECKERED FLAG cards and just the roll of the dice. But ultimately Keri won NASCAR Champions!
play or pass
Play. You roll a bunch of dice. Then you choose a subset of those dice to play in ascending numerical order to cause small, plastic cars to move around a race track. Insert cards to cause random havoc. Rinse and repeat for lap two. It’s simple, but fairly fun.
Much of the criticism of NASCAR Champions is that there are more strategic and nuanced racing games. Sure. But as I mention in my review, NASCAR Champions requires you to show up for your turn. It is simple and easy to play, while still sometimes causing something close to movement programming as well as luck of the draw, and other fun things.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single, young woman in want of a boyfriend, must be in possession of a crush.
— me, channeling Jane Austen
I recently reached out to my social media circle for crush stories. I heard back from more people than I anticipated, and you can see reflected back in these recollections just about the entire spectrum of the crush. I even snuck a couple in myself.
These stories are in a random order. Names have been changed at times to protect the innocent and/or guilty. The ratings were assigned by me. The songs were offered by the crushers. Enjoy!
Note: this post is in coordination with HappiMess Media, a crush of mine. She is posting crush stories all month long, so be sure to stop by if you have not already. I am even sneaking one on there this month!
I first noticed him in the hallways of my high school. I had recently re-read the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles, and this boy was precisely what I imagined Armand to look like: a beauty for the ages whose tastes were ever-so-slightly out of place. Kind of classic-looking. He seemed sophisticated and carried himself with pride.
He had very long, brown hair that he mostly kept in a low ponytail. He wore simple clothing – usually jeans and a plain button up shirt. He had the biggest brown eyes you’ve ever seen.
I never knew this boy or any of his friends. I asked around a little bit and eventually learned that he was an opera singer, something completely foreign to me but totally consistent with Armand. I learned he was strong and fairly well known in our school weight lifting circles, also foreign but still consistent.
Two things happened to interrupt my shallow Armand fantasy.
We did not use the same parking lot, typically, which limited how frequently I saw him. But one day I saw him ahead of me down the long hallway to the parking lot I used, so he would arrive outside before me. While he should have just disappeared or perhaps been carted away in a horse-drawn carriage, I saw him pull away driving a garish Festiva.
Another day I was coming up the stairs from the parking lot to the school as he was walking with some friends down those same stairs. So we made eye contact as we passed each other, as was our wont. I heard someone on the sidewalk yell, “Hey Joe! You got your money?” He sort of laughed and said, “Why?” while still looking me right in the eyes. Making it clear he was Joe.
These things broke my heart in a way. My Armand, immortal and dignified, who I had admired from afar for so long now, had become Festiva Joe. We never spoke and I never learned anything more about him. I did see him several times after these incidents, and they always made me smile. As a good crush does. And then he was gone, presumably graduated and off to better things. My loss, I am absolutely sure.
I first saw “Book Guy” during orientation my first year teaching. Technically, I first saw him in a news clip during the summer about an event at that school. This Enchanting English Teacher – because, duh, men who read books are sexy – had bright eyes, smart attire, a mysterious smile, confident walk, and very alluring voice.
When I was working on a reading initiative to hang in my classroom the first week of school, “Book Guy” knocked on my door. I froze. He was 1 gajillion times hotter than on the news. Simply Stunning. Could he become a work friend??? Or more??? As my mind projected matching Christmas pajamas, quoting Dickens under the mistletoe drinking tea, decorating the tree with our eight children, spooning by the fireplace as our arms and legs twined together, he said with a wink, “Heyyyyy, you’re new and I wanted to say hi and let you know I think we live in the same neighborhood so if you would ever like to grab a coffee, chat about school, have dinner, go bowling, whatever, just ask.”
My eyes are staring and my brain is spinning SURE! YES! Our first daughter can be named after your sister. Wait…coffee, dinner, bowling. “Um…thanks, I look forward to it all,” was all I squeaked out like blurb blurb blurb durr durr. He chuckled, turned to leave, and saw my reading project. “Oh, this book! Let me know how it ends!”
So, I took a “Flirt With Books” approach and brought him a different book by the same author, with a doodled post-it note attached with coffee time and day, and left it on his desk. The whole school year we worked together here and there on this and that. We made a great academic team because his poise always reminded me to chill out and enjoy learning alongside students. My Crush deepened.
We eventually had coffee and once we even carpooled, his invite! It was heavenly to share in his space those days. I even got a hug sometimes after work – and oh, his scent. I’m still crushing after all this time, as old as we both are now, and I am happy when he will pop up to say hello and ask how it is going.
He’s still energetic and enchanting to me and I hope to always know “Book Guy”, no matter where his literary wings take him.
The song “Falling In Your Sleep”, a new song from Faraway Martin, is about spooning and snuggling and all that other good stuff. The song will always remind me of the happiness I found my first year of teaching with and crushing on “Book Guy”.
Casey is an Award-Winning International Music Educator at an American Academy in Doha, Qatar. She loves to cook and travel and read. She is an educational design and classroom instructional design nerd. Casey falls in love with nearly everyone she meets, makes friends easily, and will intentionally cross the street to pet a dog. She has quite a bit to say about love, life, and loss – and she wants her nieces to know not to ever give up hope. Follow her on Instagram at Kathleen.Riley and to find out more about what she has to say about love, life, and loss, check out her teaching/travel/inspiration blog here: https://mzlorusso.wixsite.com/adventureon
In 1st or 2nd grade, I used to walk to school with a neighbor boy who was my age. One day, he mentioned having to have one of his molars extracted. I thought that kind of dental work was very mature, so I had a brief crush on him. Nowadays, I like it when men can keep their teeth.
One thing I liked to do when I was younger was drive around town aimlessly with my mom. As I got older and developed crushes I would have her drive me past their houses. I’m a stalker, I know. Also I couldn’t turn 16 fast enough.
However there was one flaw with this plan. Brian lived on a dead end street. Yes. Stalker concerns to the max. What should we do, just drive right past and turn around at the end of the cul-de-sac?
Fortunately I did have a shitty workaround for this problem. He lived close enough to the end that I could see the house, and backyard, from the street that ran perpendicular to his.
He was 2 years older and eventually graduated and joined the Air Force. For some reason, though, he did come to my house once, when my parents weren’t home. I think I was giving him a tour of the house and we ended up in my parents’ room. We did share one brief kiss then but that was it. It was like turning around at the end of the cul-de-sac would have been. It was not great.
Wade was a brown-eyed boy in my high school. He was a foreign exchange student, very serious, and he looked like a Calvin Klein model. He was so pretty I wanted to cry. I noticed him when our eyes met in the hallway between classes, which happened three times a week when he stopped at his locker and I walked by.
I am not sure why Wade noticed me. Believe me, I was nothing special in high school. But he did, and I was immediately planning our futures together.
By the time we actually determined to speak to each other and actually hang out, I had tried to orchestrate this fun group camping trip. My mom always had a lot of trust in me, and she convinced his host parents that this would be a fun, friendly, chaperoned camping trip (instead of just a few of us, unchaperoned). The problem was, it was autumn and cold and so everyone dropped out of the trip.
So I have my crush in my keeping on a Friday night, and I couldn’t return him because I lied about the camping trip. We went to the local Happy Chef (a diner) and drank bad coffee and cocoa while we talked and got to know each other. And then we went back to my house to sleep, so it was kind of like camping? Except I was mortified laying on my bed, not about to sleep, while he slept on the floor next to my bed. It wasn’t normal and fun like we conversed all night and stuff. No, if memory serves me it was dead silent except when my stomach would growl or otherwise make a noise to fill the vast open space between us. It was horribly awkward.
I drove him home the next morning. For some reason he wanted to hang out again and we actually ended up seeing each other for a little while. Maybe a few weeks, or a couple of months or so. We got a lot less awkward, but ultimately we were not a good fit.
I had a crush on a math tutor and once the answer was “six“ and I accidentally said really loud “the answer is sex”…. So I guess that’s a Freudian slip?
Mistress told me she’d never had a crush before. Say whaaaaat??! She said she wound up being friends with or dating everyone she ever was mildly interested in, which, as many of us know, isn’t the usual trajectory of a crush.
As for me, rare were the times when I wasn’t crushing on someone. Unrequited love was my jam. In high school, Gypsy and I made each other mix tapes titled Obsession that were devoted to dudes who’d never want us back. I worked harder on collaging the covers of these cassettes than I did ever at attempting to actually talk to these guys!
I wasted no time on getting disappointed in love: I was younger than five when I had my first crush. My family lived in an apartment complex, and all the kids in the building wanted to hang out with my mom. She was goofy and young, and she humored them; she made them laugh and feel important.
Jimmy was one of the kids who’d come over to our apartment to chat with my mom. He couldn’t have been older than nine. Not only am I unsure that I got even that vague detail right, I don’t remember anything else about him. Would I even recall how he looked, if it weren’t for a round-edged photograph of him sitting on my parents’ sofa with me beside him, gazing at him with shy adoration?
But I grew up with the understanding that liking boys was the thing to do. I was sold on Disney love from the get-go; I wanted to feel like a beautiful princess, and that obviously involved falling in love with a handsome prince.
More than that, though, liking someone was fun. It entertained me. It was something to strive for and gave me purpose, which, in hindsight, is unsettling. Did having crushes enhance my development as a person, or did it hinder it?
We moved when I was five, and I never saw Jimmy again. Google and Facebook won’t tell me where he is now or what he’s up to—I just spent way too much time trying to find him using the small amount of information I could remember. But maybe crushes are meant to go this route. So much time is spent, wondering what it’d be like to be with them. It seems fitting, then, to keep wondering about them, long after they’ve vanished.
Stef is an artist/writer/dog enthusiast. Her high-spirited, cartoonish art style incorporates bright colors, exaggerated concepts, skewed perspectives, mid-century influences, and zany energy. If she bursts out laughing while drawing, she knows she’s on the right track. She celebrates all things creative on her website, HappiMess Media, which features her illustrated blog and her webcomic, Produce High. She currently lives in Orlando, Florida, with her fiancé/honey bear and their 11-year-old puppy, Max.
Kyle was interesting because I never got butterflies in my stomach when I looked at him. I just couldn’t look away.
I had a high school Photography class at the same time that Kyle would hang out in the common area with his friends. If I asked the teacher to let me go and get a soda during class, I could see him. So I did that sometimes. One of the times he even approached me while I was interacting with the vending machine. We said hi to each other and that is all, like idiots.
I also saw Kyle at shows (small, local concerts). One show in particular I wrote about in detail in my diary. He left his friends to go and sit next to me, and eventually they all ended up there around me for a bit. We talked only a little, but it was a kind of dance I suppose. I have it recorded in exquisite detail.
Another time we were both at a downtown cafe very late. We actually talked a bit, and I even tried on his fingerless gloves. We were really different from each other, but I was very interested in him. This particular evening I got to know him a little better and realized how much of a connection we really had outside of just chemistry. We were getting closer.
I knew Kyle’s family was planning a move, but there was a future timeline that I knew of. Then one day I saw him in the hallway carrying several books and some slips of paper. He informed me that he was moving more quickly than anticipated, and I let the dull realization of it wash over me while I stared at him, and his books, and his papers. I can still see him in this moment when I think of it.
I feel certain we would have gone out if not for the heartless variables of time and circumstance. I think he even called me once after he’d moved, but I was on a trip and did not have a return number. You win, time. You win, circumstance. You win, again.
Larry was clever and wicked, even as a young, young lad. I first met him the summer before junior high when we were probably thrown together by mutual friends and a mutual scene. Larry is one of my longer stories, and it’s hard to know where to focus. I have a thousand images of him in my mind. He faded in and out of my life over five or six years.
He faded in to chase me with hand fulls of peanut butter and ketchup and smear them all over my clothes, but also my hair. He faded in to set me up with a friend of his and then flirt with me endlessly. He faded out to date some random girl for a few months. He faded in to teach me guitar and steal my notes. He faded in to ask me why I always give him such a hard time. He faded out to attend a different high school than me. He faded in to take me to prom, equal parts tender and not wanting to be there. He faded in to put his arm around me and push my hair out of my face. He faded in to be my company on a long road trip, tangled up with me in the back seat to sleep and stealing me trinkets and candies at rest-stops.
Larry would fade in and out of my life over five or six years. Then one day he never really faded back in. He is happily living somewhere in the southwest with his own family. I like to think his adorable little kids have the sharp wit of their father.
His name was Gary. I was probably 19 or 20. I was going to technical school part-time and working full-time at a car dealership.
I became friends with one of my classmates, Todd. I remember he was obsessed with his car. He was nice and we’d get lunch together, sometimes alone and sometimes with other people.
He bought a duplex in a nearby town while we were going to school. He was going to live on the second floor with his friend, Gary, and rent out the lower unit. You can see where this is going.
Well I’m fairly certain that Todd had a crush on me. And he had a huge nose, strange mannerisms, and he’d often kinda froth at the mouth when he talked while excited.
One of the first times Todd invited me over, I think to watch a movie, I met Gary. Gary was cuter, sweeter, and funnier. We became instant friends. This did not make Todd happy. The next time I went over there was because Gary invited me. And then Todd decided to start being a dick to me. So that was great.
I spent the night there once, with Gary. Gary didn’t drink and I can’t remember where we had gone, but I got drunk. I remember laying in bed next to him and we talked most of the night. Things must have started heading in some sort of direction because I remember kissing him on the cheek and saying, “10,000 kisses” and then laughing.
At the time I remember we both thought it was really funny. But I don’t remember why. I must have stayed at his house again another night because I drove his car into my work for service. Poor Todd, he must have been pissed.
I don’t know whatever happened between us. Todd probably threatened to kick him out or something. Who knows.
I met The Campbell Soup Kid at a cocktail party I hosted at my apartment. In my early 20’s I hung out like a champion and I had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances that were a ton of fun. I only held a few different cocktail parties and they were all epic.
This was my first party. It was winter. A lot of people showed up, so much so that enough smokers spilled onto the sidewalk as to attract the attention of passers-by. One of those passers-by was The Campbell Soup Kid.
I gave him this nickname because he was so damn wholesome looking. He was wearing jeans and a turtleneck sweater. He had a goddamn matching scarf and hat. His hair was messy, and his cheeks were flushed with the exertion of riding his bicycle. He looked like the poster child for Winter in Minneapolis.
I was impressed that he would stop into a random cocktail party that he passed, alone, even if the friendly folks outside the apartment might have encouraged it. He tracked me down as the hostess and introduced himself, ensuring that he was welcome. I found him a clean coffee mug and a secret stash of whiskey and wished him well. We only spoke for a few minutes but he was nice and so handsome.
I always ended my parties early, much to the chagrin of the attendees. It can be exhausting to host and by 1 or 2am I was always done. Usually this involved a nice girl making the rounds saying, “Everyone is going to this party around the corner at [some random address].” My apartment would empty and people would make their way home after passing a dark house with no party happening. She is still a hero to me.
I forgot about The Campbell Soup Kid until I saw him sitting with a friend of his in a booth at a local bar a few weeks later. My friend Matt and I were “running the gauntlet” that night, drinking a pitcher of beer at each bar, slowly making our way home. So I was tipsy for sure, but I was fine. I chatted with The Campbell Soup Kid briefly and he gave me his number, asking me to inform him of any future parties.
I saw him again within a couple of weeks, this time in the morning at a coffee shop where I was also with my friend Matt, studying. At least this proved I could drink more than alcohol. I said hello, but I did a terrible job. My charm doesn’t really kick in that early in the morning.
Eventually some event came up that caused me to pull out his number and inform him of a party via voicemail. He never called me back, never showed up and was soon forgotten. I hope he remained youthful, forever riding his bicycle through the streets of Minneapolis in winter. They seriously need him this year.
I first saw David probably a year before we ever met. I would see him on the crowded bus as I went home from work. We would make eye contact, but it was always crowded. I’m sure we just wanted to get home.
One evening I worked rather late, working against a deadline. I finally caught the bus home around 8pm or 8:30pm.
And there was David. And an empty bus between us. I sat down for the ride home, but he immediately got up and walked toward me. He was a little unsteady on his feet, and I think he had been drinking.
We spoke for a bit, about nothing. When we got to my stop, he got off the bus even though I knew his stop was later. He wanted to get my number. We walked around a shop for a little bit longer, which only served to show how sober I was after all that work and how tipsy David was after all of whatever he had been doing. When I was satisfied he was not following me, I headed home.
I had given him my number, because our expectations get really low sometimes. We talked once or twice but nothing ever really happened.
I chose “Lovecats” by The Cure because it seems like the very thing that is going through all of our heads in those situations, like on the bus, but the reality is a much shorter, more disappointing song.
Crushes are year-round fun!
Please share your crush stories in the comments here! It’s so much fun! Alternatively you can send them privately to myself or to Stef at HappiMess Media. We will find them a good home.
But if I get at least three crush stories in the comments here then I will share at least one more of my own. Let’s make a deal!
Review: The Dick Tracy Game Publisher: University Games Year: Timeless (I can’t find a date on the box or rules but BGG says 1990) Tagline: Help Dick Tracy solve crimes, capture the colorful cast of criminals and save the city.
how we met
Hey guess what, I found The Dick Tracy Game at a thrift shop once. I was not familiar with the game, but I purchased it anyway. Dick Tracy as a property has a great design to it, in my opinion, and the board game is no exception. Such a pretty cover, and so yellow too!
how it plays
The Dick Tracy Game is a roll and move game where the object is to have the most CRIME POINTS after all the criminals have been captured. Then you win!
There are so many Dick Tracy’s!
The Dick Tracy criminals will be nestled around the board with their faces peering out of little windows in envelope HIDEOUT PACKETS, so you know who the criminal is. What you don’t know is their WEAPON or what CRIME they committed. The HIDEOUT PACKETS need to be filled in a specific order, so don’t skim that section of the rules.
Here we are mid-play, with a few HIDEOUT PACKETS left
In order to capture these criminals, you need to fight them. As you make your way across the board, you will land on (not necessarily by exact count yay!) what are called KEYHOLE squares. If the building still has a criminal in it, then you can pick up the HIDEOUT PACKET, look at only the WEAPON card and decide if you want to fight that criminal. If you do, you must spin a higher level weapon than the criminal has. If you lose the fight, you must go to the hospital and lose one turn. If you win the fight, take that packet – but you don’t get to look at it until you deliver the criminal to jail! If you tie, you win. Because you are a Dick Tracy.
No, curious readers, your eyes do not deceive you. Bath is a weapon.
The CRIME the criminal committed remains a secret until you secure the prisoner. This matters because that CRIME will either award you with CRIME POINTS or, more rarely, take them away. So you are carrying a grab-bag to jail, my friends. Choose well.
Until you get your HIDEOUT PACKET to jail it can be stolen or criminals can escape. For instance, if your Dick Tracy lands on the square of another Dick Tracy then you can steal any of their HIDEOUT PACKETS that you like. It’s kind of brutal. So don’t forget to drive by the Police Station every so often. Once you secure those CRIME POINTS by taking the CRIME card, putting the criminal in Jail, and putting the WEAPON back in its pile, you no longer have a HIDEOUT PACKET and your points can’t be taken away.
A sampling of the HIDEOUT PACKET contentsThe Blank in their spot on the board. What CRIME have they committed? None of your business until you do the work!
The game also has SUBWAY squares, that allow you to move across the board more simply.
Another type of square on the board is the Dick Tracy square. If you land here by exact count you draw a DICK TRACY CARD. These are primarily positive cards and some are nice saves for later in the game. One is called Jail Break and causes 2 criminals to escape, meaning you need to create new HIDEOUT PACKETS out of any 2 criminals in the jail. Meaning don’t draw that card more than once or your game will go on and on and on until you can’t build packets anymore!
Escape the Bath might sound ridiculous, but you’ve probably never used one of the Lush jelly bombs then
The game ends when all criminals are captured and all players make their way back to the Police Station. The player with the most CRIME POINTS is the best detective and wins The Dick Tracy Game!
how it went
Ah, the memories. I messed up by not noticing that you don’t have to land on the different criminal squares by exact count for the first part of our game, which made my group angry. And this was righteous anger! It should be the first thing I mention in a roll and move game. Not my finest moment.
The other issue we ran into is that people weren’t listening to the rules and kept looking at the CRIME card! You can’t look at the CRIME card!!! You don’t know what you are getting, and that’s the point! This game is even less fun when you remove that mysterious aspect of it.
You look at the WEAPON and that is it. That. Is. It. PS. You are fucked here because the bomb is the most powerful weapon
We had the Jail Break card come up twice during play, which felt like a lot. It felt like you start to clear the board of criminals and then two more get out there. This can be a drag when the game is not super fun. I didn’t mind too much, though. That’s two more mystery packages for me to desire.
For some reason I didn’t record who won our game. I think Bill won. I know it wasn’t me. Most of us just have vague memories of being blown up at some point. I think I ended up with some real stinkers in my HIDEOUT PACKETS , in true grab bag fashion. I didn’t look at the cards in advance, so learning that some actually subtract from your ultimate score was a super fun surprise.
Yes, I was talking about you, you painful thing
play or pass
Play. I am okay going on the record calling this one a play. And I’ll tell you why. First of all, any time an old roll-and-move game introduces new and interesting game play I think it is worth a play or two. If The Dick Tracy Game was stacked against other games-based-on-movies, it would probably end up decently in the rankings.
Secondly, I have fond memories of the NES video game, too! It reminded me a little of Police Quest. I owned so few NES games, so I played everything I owned to death. And I owned Dick Tracy.
But thirdly I might as well tell you, again, that I am a lifelong buyer of grab bags. I am a gambler. I own a Golden Snitch-shaped fidget spinner – something I would never purchase in a million years but is one of the best items a grab bag has ever rewarded me with.
Carrying a packet that I am not able to open until I get to the Police Station could have been a game designed by me. So I say… play!
Review: National Enquirer Game Publisher: Tyco Games Year: 1991 Tagline: The Outrageously Funny Headline Game!
how we met
I have been wanting a headline game for awhile now, and I see them every so often. And rarely the same one – they are legion. But I would be hard-pressed to imagine a more appropriate headline game for the blog than one based on the illustrious print tabloid National Enquirer. Picking this up at thrift was a no-brainer.
how it plays
The object of National Enquirer Game is to have the most points at the end of play. Play ends after four entire games have been played, each consisting of three rounds. Players take turns being the EDITOR in each game. So, 3 rounds = 1 game and 4 games = one play with a winner at the end.
A random sampling of photo cards
At the beginning of a game, the EDITOR deals 1 photo card face down to each player, including themselves. The EDITOR then reaches their hand into the magical bag of COPY TILES and places a “generous portion” of them onto the COPY DESK board in the middle. These COPY TILES are words: nouns, verbs and adjectives.
Use your words…
The EDITOR then flips the ONE MINUTE TIMER and all players flip their photos and start to dig out of the same pool of COPY TILES to make their headlines.
COPY TILES consist of different colors, and if your headline is made up of all the same color (red, blue or green) then your score gets doubled, so you may want to have a care if you can. Time is short though, get that headline together.
A few of the COPY TILES are blank, so you can turn them into any word beginning with that letter
When time is up, each player presents their headline to the EDITOR and they decide the scoring within the guidelines of the game. Players get one point for each COPY TILE used, negative points for incomplete headlines, negative points if they took COPY TILES that they did not use, and there is some subjectivity to whether or not the headline goes with the photo. And yes, the EDITOR gets to score their own headline too.
Jot the scores down and repeat this process with the same EDITOR where Round 2 gives each player 2 photos and Round 3 gives each player 3 photos. Once the third round is complete then the next player becomes the EDITOR for a new game.
The rules look like a tabloid too!
The player with the most points at the end of four games wins!
how it went
National Enquirer Game rules state that four players is the optimum for the game, so we had that going for us. One house rule I would strongly suggest is to only allow one hand at the COPY DESK. I spent our first round looking at Bill’s left hand hoarding the COPY DESK as he also fished the tiles with his right hand.
It gets frenzied in here
The game is relatively dated, as you can imagine for a news-driven game from 1991. We are all the right age to remember the characters in the photos, some of us more distantly than others. The game has Gorbachev, Prince Charles, Nixon and other news-worthy figures. But even if you don’t know a lot of the photos, it’s not a big deal. The game is also full of random people, chimpanzees, cars, weird people wearing masks and the kind of randomness you would expect from a tabloid magazine game.
I like how you can kind of make the game more or less challenging by merely adjusting how many COPY TILES you allow as the EDITOR. One of my rounds I intentionally picked out fewer COPY TILES and we had to fight a lot harder for our headlines as a result. And that timer is quick.
I am not a big fan of the scoring, although I don’t think it could have been done any differently really. Bill thinks that the player to go last will always win because they have the scoring power at the end of the game. That is a pessimistic view, but perhaps true. It certainly was true in our game. I think there is potential to break the game with the wrong person wielding the score power. I wouldn’t have the patience to come to an agreement though either.
We had a lot of fun playing. We laughed a lot, and sometimes the magic of just the right combination of photos and tiles to tell a story happened. Sometimes we played it safe with boring but practical headlines that applied to the photos.
I always appreciate how John really steps into the role he is supposed to play in a board game. He acted like an EDITOR and his turn at the helm made it feel like we were really pitching headlines until he said, “Looks good. Print it!”
Looks good. Ship it!This photo headlines itself, but this will score a bundle as all blue wordsAll green, with both the photo and COPY TILE for Prince Charles! If you go for mixed colors or black COPY TILES, make it as long and beautiful as you canA sexy woman, what appears to be a burning carrot and what appears to be a glory hole. This one was tough
We all dreaded Bill’s turn as EDITOR. But I have to say he was actually a lot more fair than I had expected. But he wiped the floor with us in scoring. Keri, John and I were pretty close in scores, and Bill beat John by over 40 points.
play or pass
Play a couple of times if you find it cheap. You need a group that is at least attempting to be fair in scoring. But ultimately this is like a lot of games where you are required to be creative – you get out what you put in. I don’t think the replay value is high, and you go through nearly 100 of the 256 photo cards in a single play. But it can be absurd and ridiculous fun for a limited time.
I don’t remember when we bought Happy Festivus or that it had any kind of interesting tale behind it. Bill is a fan of Seinfeld, and I like Seinfeld okay. Playing a board game based on the premise of a single episode of an old sitcom is right up Idle Remorse’s alley. The fact that it was created in 2017 based on an episode that first aired in 1997 really drove home that we needed to buy the game when finding it at thrift.
FUN FACT: Did you know that Festivus existed prior to the Seinfeld episode? According to Wikipedia, it was originally created by author Daniel O’Keefe, whose son would later co-write the Seinfeld episode where Festivus was introduced to the wider world.
how it plays
Happy Festivus is a roll and move game with the goal to collect four Festivus TICKETS by winning four FEATS OF STRENGTH and landing your Festivus pole pawn in the middle of the board to successfully take on the ULTIMATE FEAT OF STRENGTH. Throughout play, you will also encounter Festivus miracles and the opportunity to do some AIRING OF GRIEVANCES.
Players collectively choose and write down four FEATS OF STRENGTH at the start of play and number them one through four. We mostly chose from the suggested items in the rules and had high roll, low roll, rock paper scissors and stand on one foot with eyes closed the longest. But you can pick anything that you are willing to participate in!
The sticky pads just waiting for your input
When a pawn lands on FEATS OF STRENGTH, they draw a Festivus TICKET from the pile and reveal its number. These TICKETs have numbers already on the backs of them, so this will tell you which FEAT OF STRENGTH you must do. Then other players raise their hand to challenge you, and you choose your opponent from these volunteers. If you win the match, you keep the TICKET and are that much closer to winning. If you lose the match, no bigs and play moves to the next player’s turn. If no one volunteers, you get that TICKET for free!
The Festivus TICKETS, showing two of four possible numbers because I am lazy
The AIRING OF GRIEVANCES space allows a player to write a grievance on a little sticky note and read it aloud while sticking it on the player that caused the grievance. The idea is to let your fellow players know how they have let you down in the past year.
Other spaces on the board cause you to draw a Festivus card that may force your pawn to move or get you a free TICKET or other random things. The board also contains safe spaces.
Example Festivus Cards chosen randomly
The first player to successfully collect four Festivus TICKETs and win the ULTIMATE FEAT OF STRENGTH wins! It’s a Festivus miracle!
how it went
As luck would have it, we had a guest for this game night so we played with five players. I had never met this poor man before. We were playing The Chicken Grand Slam game when he showed up and I pulled out Happy Festivus next, but he stayed anyway and so perhaps will join us more often. What better way to make a guest feel welcome than to air grievances together?
FUN FACT: if you google Festivus the results page has a Festivus pole along the entire page of search results!
The cheery pawns are Festivus poles
We were conservative in our choices of FEATS OF STRENGTH, so the rest of this game was just rolling and moving and bitching about each other. And we hadn’t gamed in a few weeks really, so I think we were in a particularly heady mood.
There is not much to say about the gameplay, though. We moved our pawns around the board and challenged each other in FEATS OF STRENGTH. I volunteered every time, I do believe. When I was challenged I sometimes won and sometimes lost.
Our play to give you a look at the board
As a game group, we were very willing and able participants in the AIRING OF GRIEVANCES portion of gameplay. When I informed the group that we would be writing down our grievances, tearing them off, sticking them on someone and reading them aloud they were delighted. Even our new gamer participated by calling John out on a couple of things, although he is the only one I would have described as hesitant in his grievance airing.
Keri and I spent hours making cookies one day in December. Her implication in this grievance is that my almond cookies look like turds. I guess it’s pretty clear. The important thing is she started it. My other note is just a nice one from John.These are grievances about Bill. That dog mouth one is an inside joke that was only about 20 minutes old at this pointMy writing fell apart a bit at the end because I wanted to look in Keri’s eyes as I wrote this
The other spaces causing a player to draw a Festivus card were mostly nothing. Bill was able to draw and keep a FEAT OF STRENGTH TICKET for free through a Festivus card, and our guest got to steal a couple of turns, but the rest were just causing us to move mildly around the board. We were just trying to roll as quickly as possible to help someone get their TICKETs and end the game, while not ever giving an inch in our actual gameplay.
When Bill got to the ULTIMATE FEATS OF STRENGTH, he (perhaps wisely) challenged me to a blind balance-on-one-leg challenge. And I lost that bet, as though it was foreseen. And Bill won Happy Festivus!
FUN FACT: Years ago, Bill and I got $40 in $1 bills, each taking $20, so we could bet each other incessantly about every single thing for the next few days or so. His favorite memory of this period is me losing a one-minute, one-legged balancing bet in a mall parking lot. I was so solid, you guys, but then this car drove by really quickly and I made the mistake of following it with my eyes. I lost my balance seconds before the time was up by falling toward the car. #noob
play or pass
Pass. Happy Festivus is plain, old roll and move in a particular theme. I can see game groups getting creative with the FEATS OF STRENGTH and playful with the AIRING OF GRIEVANCES. I can appreciate the contradiction of a consumer product like this game around the anti-commercial holiday of Festivus. But the cards are kind of nothing. I can’t imagine playing it more than once. Maybe if it came with a free makeup bag or something.
