Idle Remorse

Review: Happy Festivus

By On January 21, 2019 With 2 Comments

Review: Happy Festivus
Publisher: Aquarius
Year: 2017
Tagline: IT’S A FESTIVUS MIRACLE

Cover shows man from Seinfeld saying Festivus for the rest of us

how we met

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! 

Two sticky pads, one saying airing of grievances and the other feats of strength
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!

Feat of strength tickets showing printed numbers on back 3 and 4
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 cards show Move forward 3 spaces and Roll again
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!

Poles with crosses or X's at the bottom
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. 

The board during play
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. 

Two grievances on my arm, one saying that I bake turd cookies
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.
Grievances say You have dog mouth breath and You threatened divorce you bastard
These are grievances about Bill. That dog mouth one is an inside joke that was only about 20 minutes old at this point
Grievance on Keri that says Yours looked more like turds than mine did
My 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.

Review: Management Material: Information Technology

By On January 16, 2019 With 2 Comments

Review: Management Material: Information Technology
Publisher: Zipwhaa, Inc.
Year: 2003
Tagline: What’s your excuse?

Cover shoes two M's handcuffed together with a necktie between them

how we met

I encountered Management Material: Information Technology at a thrift shop, like usual. But it was kind of an impulse buy. It was bagged up and hanging near the line to the registers. I’m not a big fan of the cover (like, what are those M’s about? I get the reference to the name, but what are they?) but having created my own card game related to Information Technology, I was excited to check it out! 

how it plays

The object of Management Material: Information Technology is essentially to be the last slob standing. You are trying to avoid taking on projects because they award you with points, and if you get 30 or more points then you are promoted to management! And that means you lose. 

The game has two different decks of cards. The RESOURCE deck consists of EXCUSES and RECOGNITION cards. The ASSIGNMENT deck consists of PROJECTs and EVENTs. 

Players start the game with 5 cards from the RESOURCE deck. The game is played in rounds. The first player takes the turn marker to indicate it is their turn. They then draw 2 RESOURCE cards and then turn over a card from the ASSIGNMENT deck.

Example excuse cards like that you are building Y3k defenses
D’oh! I’d love to but my screen went blank again

More than likely the player will turn over a PROJECT card. These cards show a number in the lower left corner indicating their level of effort, basically, and a snarky assignment on the right. All cards have accompanying cartoons that are a lot of fun too. 

Example event cards like make the website pretty
“Mother loved paisleys..” *snort*

The first player must either take on the PROJECT card, thereby adding that many points to their total, or make an EXCUSE that equals or exceeds the effort required by the PROJECT card. If they are successful then the next player must also excuse themselves or take the PROJECT card. This continues until the PROJECT card is claimed, even if it circles multiple times (this rule is not clear in the rulebook but is clarified on the website).

When a player has an EXCUSE then another player can also play a RECOGNITION card on the active player. These cards generally make that active player look better or will try to bribe them or something. They increase the level of effort of that PROJECT, which will cause the active player to have to take the card or play another EXCUSE. RECOGNITION plays are one-time and do not stick to the player or PROJECT as it passes round. 

A few cards in the ASSIGNMENT deck are EVENT cards. Those are doozies, so I won’t reveal more than one. If you play this game, I want you to discover them blindly like John and Keri did. But they shake things up. 

Event card asking all players to pass their cards to the left
There’s a lot more pain where this came from

Play continues until a last player is standing and all others have been promoted to management. The non-manager is the winner!

how it went

I am a veteran of Corporate America, reporting to the same mother ship for many, many years. I love office humor, and I love IT humor. I knew this game would be a fun play through for that reason alone. 

I did a little reading about how the game came about. The designer is from Wisconsin, which is probably why I found the game at thrift. One of the things the publisher website encourages that the rules do not mention, and that we did not fully embrace, was treating the game almost as a storytelling game. It’s one thing to play numbers and beat numbers, but trying to weave a consistent story and calling on your real life experiences to give more depth to your excuses is where the magic is supposed to happen. I like the idea of that gameplay better than what we played, but I think many of the cards make that approach difficult by being too specific. Or by not giving us roles so we can create their stories. “Karen did it again!”

Our group often adds storytelling flavor to the games we play naturally, and Management Material: Information Technology didn’t bring out our creative sides, for whatever reason.

There are a number of things that I thought Management Material: Information Technology does well. One is that the back of the turn marker is an advertisement for the artist that did the illustrations. I thought that was a neat idea and great way to thank your artist (beyond paying them; always pay them). 

The turn marker is a computer that says "My turn"
The back of this card points you to the artist’s website

A lot of the humor was spot-on, and this game is aging now. IT will never be a theme that ages terribly well, but the humor will remain for those that were around at that time. And most of the references are still valid in this game, like blue screen of death, JAVA, translating technobabble, 404, etc. And I daresay the reference to sticky keyboards is evergreen.

The snarky concept of avoiding work in order to win is common in office-themed games. But I very much enjoyed the idea of weaponizing RECOGNITION. It would have been more humorous to me if the RECOGNITION was coming from us as fellow workers instead of always the boss.

Recognition cards show a gross boss winking at you giving thumbs up
Ah the price of general competence..

From a gameplay perspective I definitely have a few criticisms. I think there are better ways to accomplish the ability to make excuses than just highest number – maybe a combination of numbers and some other variable. There is an old game called Overpower that uses a nice, elegant concept that I think should be implemented elsewhere, as I think it was poorly executed. I used to play a homemade version using our role-playing characters, streamlined rules and proper balance years and years ago. An office version would be endless fun! But it would be more role-centric.

Another challenge of Management Material: Information Technology is having players drop out of play. Then you have people just sitting around watching play, no longer participating.

In our play, I ended up shooting up the ranks pretty quickly due to a combination of bad luck and playing poorly at the beginning. I sat back with my glass of wine and watched John and Keri battle it out to avoid PROJECTs and make EXCUSEs. The EVENT cards played a huge role in extending this play. 

My project cards adding up to 33
This is what I bit off and chewed while everyone else played the game

I would estimate they played a little over half the game without me. Eventually Keri ran out of EXCUSEs and had to take on the PROJECT that pushed her over the edge into management (I assume I outranked her though as first loser) and John won the game!

play or pass

Pass. Management Material: Information Technology is good for a few giggles, but ultimately the game relies too much on humor. The replay-ability is not high, at least for us. And you are really just trying to play bigger numbers than your opponents, assuming you have not been knocked out of the game already. While I very much appreciate the humor, this game gets a pink slip from me.

Review: Scavenger Hunt

By On January 13, 2019 With 2 Comments

Review: Scavenger Hunt
Publisher: Milton Bradley
Year: 1983
Tagline: A MADCAP SEEK AND SEARCH GAME

The cover shows cartoon madness of people and objects

how we met

I found Scavenger Hunt this past summer on a typical weekend in an atypical location. We stumbled upon a thrift shop that we had never visited before or since. It’s one of those places where the entire store is half off all the time. They had a huge number of board games, and I found some great and rare stuff, including Scavenger Hunt. The cover is pretty cute, and I am more likely to take a chance on an old Milton Bradley game I don’t recognize than I am to leave it behind.

The friendly man working the cash register looked at me with some concern when he saw I was buying so many games, including Rich Little’s VCR Charades game. But he quickly pulled himself together and tried to sell me a VCR.

how it plays

The object of Scavenger Hunt is just as implied: you are supposed to find four objects hidden throughout a house. The catch is that these objects must be captured in a specific order and moves along the board are limited and, at times, tricky. 

Each player chooses a pawn and receives four random OBJECT DISCs and puts the discs face up in front of them. Each player will need paper and pen for this part, which is kind of annoying but also necessary. Here’s how you place your objects.

Choose a GARAGE, ATTIC, CLOSET and KITCHEN card out of the deck. Shuffle them together and then reveal them one by one and place whatever of your OBJECT DISCs you want into those spaces by looking for the room in your pawn’s color. But you need to track each item as you go. 

Overview of the board with objects placed
Here we are set up for play. If the illustrations look familiar, it’s because they were done by Jack Davis, an illustrator for Mad Magazine!

For example if I am the blue pawn and the first card is CLOSET then I may choose Dentures from my OBJECT DISCs, place it on the blue CLOSET space on the board and write down on my paper that my first object is Dentures in the CLOSET. This will randomize where you need to travel throughout play. 

My sticky note says 1. dentures - closet; 2. bongoes - garage. Etc
My poorly-written list to demonstrate

Now shuffle all of the cards together and deal 5 to each player. Players look at their hands but should not share with other players. 

On a player’s turn they draw a card from the deck. Then they roll the two dice. If they roll doubles then they draw an additional card from the deck. Players move along the white spaces by simply moving their pawns, but they can only move through rooms or the YARD by playing cards matching those spaces. The card showing FOUR ARROWS can be used to move into any room.

Example cards
The possible cards you may draw

Players must move their full dice roll with two exceptions:

  1. If you are able to get to the OBJECT DISC you need, you can claim it and your turn will end regardless of any movement left
  2. If you are in the garage it is possible that you can be stuck by not having a card matching any nearby rooms; all other spaces on the board have white spaces next to them and you will need to keep moving

There are a couple of challenges with moving. One is that pawns must move in the direction of the arrows, and that’s a long way around the board. The only time you can go backwards is if you bounce off a DOG pawn.

The game has two DOG pawns and cards to match them in the deck. You can play a DOG card at any point on your turn (beginning, middle or end) to control your movement, block another player, rest your eyes on a nearby dog, whatever. When a player pawn hits a DOG pawn then they bounce back and go backward along the track. But they don’t keep moving backward. On their next turn they will probably need to either move the DOG, enter the middle using cards or just bounce off the DOG again and hope for better cards. 

You can get trapped between two DOGs. The rulebook even has examples! 

If you have two cards in your hand that match, you can discard them at the end of your turn to take another turn. If you run out of cards, simply draw 5 new cards. They just can’t be played until your next turn. 

The first player to retrieve all of their OBJECT DISCs in the correct sequence and get back to their start space wins! 

Example discs include Wig, Plastic Flamingo, Moose Head, Hubcap, etc
These pepperoni-looking things are the OBJECT DISCs

how it went

[It turned out that my copy was not 100% complete and was missing the pawns and dice. Keri chose our pawns and dice from a bag of spare parts.]

We played this 3 player because Bill was out of town.

The rules for Scavenger Hunt are pretty extensive for what ends up being a simple game. But when I tried to explain how to play above, it took a lot of words. So it may look daunting but is very simple and just requires a bit of explanation. 

My pawn was a fly
Bzzzt, I was a fly!

The DOG pawns were a lot of fun. I was excited to learn that you can possibly get caught between two DOGs and hoped my terrible friends would make that happen. But the direction of the board makes the DOG pawns important to orchestrate your own movement too. They remind me a lot of the spy tiles in Spy vs Spy and work very similarly. And a player may learn the same lesson: blocking your opponents early on is fine, but you might need that card later in the game to help bounce yourself in a different direction.

Each turn is almost like a tiny little logic puzzle. Not a terribly difficult one, but you can think a turn or two ahead with the cards in your hand and try to plan your moves accordingly. 

Dentures, Bongoes and Indian Head sitting on my space
Here I have captured 3 of my 4 OBJECT DISCs

Toward the beginning of play Keri and I were doing well while John was falling behind. As play progressed, this caused Keri and I to focus our “take that” DOG bombs on each other. John ended up catching up to us with 3 OBJECT DISCs. Once we realized we needed to try and block him, he had the cards he needed to capture his last OBJECT DISC and get home safely. He moved the dogs first so they could participate in his victory. John was the winner of Scavenger Hunt! 

John's pawn was a bug on his start space to end the game
John’s win, flanked by DOGs

play or pass

Play. This is not my most enthusiastic play recommendation, but the scales definitely tip toward play. I liked the movement challenges in Scavenger Hunt, and I think it does a really nice job of balancing strategy and luck. If you happen upon it hidden away in an attic somewhere, blow off the dust and give it a whirl. 

Review: Intern

By On January 6, 2019 With 3 Comments

Review: Intern
Publisher: Avalon Hill
Year: 1979
Tagline: Now YOU are the physician!

Cover shows doctors in an operating room

how we met

I met Intern through my witchy ways. A few weeks ago I had never heard of the game before. But about once a month I do a quick board game search on sale sites. I’m not sure why I do this. I have never bought anything, and they usually want way too much. But I saw Intern for the first time on one of these sites. I added it to my wishlist based on the cover and premise.

Fast forward a few hours. Less than a day. Bill and I are walking through a thrift shop we rarely visit because we have rarely found anything there. And there is Intern. For me. My very own copy of Intern, as though I had willed it. It was basically an episode of Black Mirror (one of the less horrifying ones). 

how it plays

The object of Intern is to be the first intern to diagnose and treat all the PATIENTs in their department, while scoring points via things like having the most hours in TIME SCRIP accrued and not letting any PATIENTs die. The player with the most points wins!

Intern is a roll and move game where you land on spaces that may help you admit, diagnose and treat your four PATIENTs. A PATIENT must be admitted into one of the three beds in your ward by landing on the PATIENT number in your ward and paying TIME SCRIP equal to the number of the PATIENT to the bank (ie if you land on 2 in your ward you may pay 2 TIME SCRIP to admit PATIENT 2 from ER to your ward into any available bed).

Overview of the board showing four wards in four colors
The track is the inner, cross-shaped section

Once a PATIENT is admitted to one of your beds, you match your Diagnosis or Dx CARD to them in order to diagnose them. You collect Dx CARDs whenever you land on an orange space on the board such as Chemistry or Radiology and pay 1 TIME SCRIP. 

There are generally two Dx CARDs per PATIENT. One of them has a single arrow at the top and indicates the PATIENT should stay and be treated in your ward. The second has two arrows at the top, indicating another ward that can best treat the PATIENT. If you get the latter Dx CARD then you TRANSFER that patient to the other ward, freeing a bed in your own ward and essentially making that PATIENT someone else’s problem. Otherwise you wait for the other Dx CARD and treat the PATIENT yourself.

Diagnosis cards including Chest Pain with two arrows indicating potential transfer
Yellow is the Medicine department but this patient can also be treated by Surgery if I have the upper left Dx CARD

Similar to Dx CARDs, the game has Treatment or Rx CARDs. These cards are obtained by landing on purple spaces on the board like Operating Room or Pharmacy and paying 1 TIME SCRIP. A PATIENT can’t be treated until they have been diagnosed, and they can’t be diagnosed until they have been admitted, and they can’t be admitted until you land on the right space and pay up. Once you are able to accomplish admission, diagnosis and treatment then the PATIENT is considered discharged. Set them aside for later scoring.

Treatment cards like Coma with list of care
Treatment cards are called Rx in the rulebook

If a player lands on a PATIENT space within another intern’s ward, they must pay that intern out of their TIME SCRIP bank, which is called a CONSULTATION. You know, like they own the property and have a hotel on it. The amount paid depends upon whether the PATIENT number you landed on is admitted, diagnosed, not admitted, discharged, etc. 

If you roll doubles you may roll again, but watch out. Rolling doubles three times in a row lands you in ICU! (It’s jail, guys)

And if you roll snake eyes at any time, you have a dead PATIENT on your hands!

Finally there are spaces on the board that cause you to draw a PAGE card. These cards may reward you with TIME SCRIPs, cause you to pay in, cause PATIENTs to move around, allow you to get out of ICU free or even stick you with the WILD TURKEY patient, an undiagnosable hot potato. 

Example page cards that take or give time scrip
The theme really shines in the PAGE cards

When you pass the entrance of your own ward, collect 6 hours of TIME SCRIP. (It’s go, guys)

There are a few other spaces that give you options of what to do when landing on them, but they are a combination of the spaces already noted here. 

Once a player has no PATIENTs left in their ward or ER the game ends and points get awarded according to a long list of 11 things. The intern with the most points wins Intern! 

how it went

Since I will probably not be very kind to Intern, I will start by saying that the rulebook strongly recommends 4 players, but we played 2 player and used the adjusted rules for it. Normally I would pull John and Keri into the fold for a game recommended at 4 players, but this one just wasn’t worth playing through again. 

So Intern is a hospital-themed Monopoly, in case that was not clear. One thing that sometimes bugs me with vintage games is the abandonment of theme. That is not a problem with Intern, and in fact results in hugely over-complicating what is otherwise a simple, reskinned type of gameplay. 

Colored paper money that shows hours instead of dollars
Intern money is in hours and not dollars, a nice thematic touch

There are a full six pages of rulebook that you must read in order to play the game properly and learn about all the little nuances. The rules themselves are not complex, but six full pages of walls of text is too much. These could have used some reorganization and an editor. 

Another example of overly complicating the game is having us run through 11 items in a list to add up our score. 11! 

The list of 11 scoring items like Wild Turkey is negative sixteen points
The scoring rules

The BGG comments do give fair warning: if you work in a medical field then you may enjoy the game but otherwise you are not likely to. Fair enough. 

I actually admire the decision to be loyal to the theme. I myself have made a niche card game and given deference to theme over gameplay. But I also stuck a big, fat time limit on it. 

Intern falls into the classic pain point of requiring you to land on certain spaces by exact count. You can probably roll well enough to get a few PATIENTs into your ward, but in our play we both were sitting on one or two PATIENTs waiting admission for a long time. It’s a grind. You miss the space you need and settle in for another spin around the entire fucking hospital. I was actually kicking ass at the game until I fell into this endless merry-go-round and never did end up getting my last PATIENT admitted.

Patient cards list age and symptoms
Four patients requiring four spaces you must land on

Bill won our game of Intern by a long shot. I ended up with the dumb WILD TURKEY patient and no means to transfer them. And that was our Intern play. Pagers were paged. Patients were diagnosed, treated and discharged. Some lives were lost. And hours were spent, both in game and out. 

But would I get up and do it all again tomorrow? Nope.

play or pass

Pass. Reading the rulebook will be just the beginning of your long, arduous journey. I am not the target market for Intern, but the gameplay was long and slow and it hurts here when I play it.

* points to heart *
* points to head *
* points to watch *

Review: The Mask 3-D Board Game

By On December 21, 2018 With 2 Comments

Review: The Mask 3-D Board Game
Publisher: Parker Brothers
Year: 1994
Tagline: Based on the movie

The board game cover showing picture of Jim Carrey as The Mask

how we met

This is actually kind of a funny story. I met a fun group of gamers out of the Milwaukee area through Facebook. They have a fondness for vintage, cheesy board games (although they have more discerning taste than yours truly) so we got along great. 

At some point this group invited me to their Facebook chat group called Thrifting Minions. This let us pick up games for each other and brag about awesome finds in our area. One day, Thrifting Minion Josh posted a photo holding The Mask 3-D Board Game.

Josh holding the game saying "If it wasn't $10 and didn't look terrible..."
You can see that Josh just wasn’t that into The Mask

Fast forward about two or three days and Bill had gone thrifting on a Friday. When he thrifts without me he sends me photos of his finds, which I eat up throughout my day. And on this particular day.. I bet you’ll never guess what I saw in a photo of his trunk on this day. 

Bill's trunk has The Mask, 1313 Dead End Drive, Talking Battleship and a Nancy Sinatra record
It’s difficult to see. Can you see it?

HOW IT PLAYS

The Mask 3-D Board Game is a set collection game where the first Stanley to return their Money to the bank plus collect their color Pajamas, Clock and Dog is the winner!

The board showing 3-d buildings and Stanley pawns, one wearing a mask
I want to show you this beautiful board immediately. Here it is getting ready for set up.

Each player is Stanley represented by a color. The needed chips (Money, Pajamas, Clock and Dog) are all mixed together face down. Then chips are placed throughout the board face down, the more difficult for you to hunt down your color of each. 

Example chips showing dog, clock, shirt and bag of money
The chips

On a player’s turn they roll the die and move that number of spaces in any direction. If they roll the crossroads-arrow-looking-thing then they may move to any space they like! When you land on a space with a chip you turn it over so everyone can see it. If it matches your Stanley color then you can keep it and place it on either the bank (if it’s Money) or the apartment of your color. If it does not match your color then you turn it back over for others to remember. 

There are a few special spaces on the board. The first two have arrows on them, and if you land there you have a choice whether to stay on that space OR hop up onto the roof of Coco Bongo. 

The other special space has a MASK on it. If a Stanley lands on this space, they take the MASK and place it over their Stanley’s head. Like a mask, duh! This gives their Stanley magical powers:

A Stanley wearing the MASK
Here is a Stanley wearing the MASK. Looks good, right?
  • If you start your turn wearing the MASK then do not roll the die, go ahead and just move to any space you want. Any space at all (well, not occupied by another Stanley)! 
  • If you land on a space with a chip and it is not your color, leave it face up – either where you found it or on any space you want. Any space at all (well, without a chip or Stanley on it already). So go ahead and move it across the board from your enemy. 
  • If you move to another player’s start space you can remove one of their chips from either the bank or their apartment and place it face up on the board on any empty space. Any empty space at all! 

If another player lands on the MASK space then they immediately take the MASK. It can be difficult to hold onto for long. 

If you are able to collect all four of your chips, you are the winner! Your reward for winning is to take the MASK and dump it into the river slot to formally end the game. 

how it went

I am such a sucker for a beautiful game, and this one is beautiful. 

I definitely saw The Mask movie when it came out back in 1994, but I had almost no memory of it (surprise, surprise). So of course Bill and I spent a regrettable evening re-watching the movie. I did that for you guys. I actually didn’t hate the first 30 or 45 minutes or so, but the humor got old, I got bored and I hadn’t even gotten to the “Cuban Pete” scene yet! 

It’s funny how we remembered different things from our original viewing of The Mask. Bill described thinking in 1994 that the special effects were so good that they looked like cartoons come to life. In 2018, they still look like cartoons come to life. But that’s not a good thing anymore, spoiled as we are with today’s special effects. And the 1990’s were plagued with 1940’s nostalgia (swing dancing, The Mask, The Marrying Man, Dick Tracy, etc). The torch singer and the cartoon gangster were well-worn tropes by the 1990’s, and that much more forgettable.

It is worth noting that The Mask had way more musical numbers than either of us remembered. We both blocked that out. 

Rewatching the movie probably did help me enjoy bits of the game slightly more, like the Coco Bongo, the river slot, the chips and such. The absurdity of its existence. Etc. 

A shot of our play showing the yellow Stanley (me) on top of the Coco Bongo building
I spent a lot of time on the roof of the Coco Bongo to try and understand why that space exists. Sure you can throw a chip up there, but you can choose to go there or not from the space below, so…?

During our play, John spent much of the game wearing the MASK. He became close to winning several times, but whenever any of us became close to winning there were three players ready to smack down the fourth. Which is fine, but it gets to be a grind. 

My shitty memory popped up during the game, which wasn’t a huge deal. I was in last place the whole time and I was so excited when I strode my Stanley confidently to what I knew was my 3rd chip, except it was not my 3rd chip. Womp, womp.

The pawns are Stanleys in blue, red, yellow and green
So very many Stanleys!

Near the end of our play, my Stanley was wearing the MASK and I was faced with the decision to obtain one of my chips (my actual 3rd chip) or block John by moving to his final chip and moving it as far away from him as possible. I am a gambler, as you know, and I decided to go for my own chip (3 out of 4 mind you, not my winning chip) despite table protestations. John would have to roll a 3 in order to get his winning chip, and he’s not always a great roller. You’ve read this blog, you know. 

But lo and behold, that fucker rolled a 3. And John won The Mask 3-D Board Game!

John's hand dropping the MASK into the river
This one’s on me

play or pass

Pass. The game was simple but lended itself to the grind. The tagline really says it all: “Based on the movie.” Because that’s why you buy this. Not for the gameplay. 

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