Idle Remorse

Review: Ad Liners

By jen On October 4, 2017 With No Comments

Review: Ad Liners
Publisher: Pressman
Year: 1989
Tagline: The hilarious game where you choose popular advertising slogans to go with outrageous pictures!

Ad Liners cover

how we met

Yeah, we met in a thrift shop. I generally pick up most games that I am unfamiliar with to determine our compatibility. I opened Ad Liners in the store and was struck by two things:

- Why is that vacuum form insert so needlessly large? This game could fit in a ziplock bag but comes in a decent size box. WHY?

- Photos, and lots of them.

four sample photographs — buy me, see me

how it plays

Ad Liners is a downright party game. Think of it as Cards Against Humanity rules where one player, the judge, draws a photo card and the other players submit the funniest ad slogan from their hand to accompany the photo. The judge then chooses their favorite slogan and that player gets one point.

The rules of Ad Liners are not this simple but should be. The official instructions are a more convoluted way of scoring what has become a familiar party game design. My suspicion is that they created these rules just to try and justify the huge vacuum form insert with all its little dips and things. The real difference in the original rules is that everyone votes; you identify yourself at the back of the slogan using a clip and your colored marker, the slogans are shuffled and placed on the ridiculous insert, and all players vote on their favorite slogan. This actually removes an interesting nuance from this type of party game, where you can choose to play to match the judge’s humor rather than your own.

how it went

We play Cards Against Humanity rules.

Ad Liners is outright risqué but in a very cheeky way. Everything is out of context. In their original context, most of the ad slogans probably ticked a lot of the right boxes: concise, attention-grabbing, memorable. But removed from this context many of the slogans are just bizarre. And then introduce a photo pairing that was never intended, and you, my friend, have a game. The game challenges you to be more aware of the advertising all around you, and ultimately of how ridiculous it can be (or become). And perhaps be more aware of different angles by which advertising is trying to appeal to you.

A dirty mind is almost a prerequisite for Ad Liners. It is difficult to choose benign ad slogans when the photo is a woman licking a man’s ear.

With 400 slogan cards and 75 photographs, the replay-ability in this game is pretty solid. I tend to make up the rules depending on the number of players to ensure we don’t run out of slogan cards (for example with four players, take seven slogan cards and play to ten points; with eight people, take five slogan cards and play to five points).

But seriously that insert is out of control.

play or pass

Big time play. You know by now whether you enjoy this type of game or not, but we always laugh throughout and it will always be welcome at the table. I feel very fortunate to have stumbled upon Ad Liners and added it to my collection. The game is not unheard of; if you are interested in it, as of this writing you can pick it up online for more than a thrift score but still a reasonable amount if you hunt a little. I have only ever seen it thrifting the one time, but keep your eyes peeled there too!

woman in shirt saying have a nice day — thanks for reading!

Review: Heavenly Body

By jen On September 30, 2017 With No Comments

Review: Heavenly Body
Publisher: MorPro, Inc.
Year: 1988
Tagline: A fun way for the whole family to battle the bulge.

how we met

You guys, this was love at first sight. The scene: a dusty, dark antique shop with a total of about seven board games. Amongst all the usual suspects I pull out Heavenly Body.

A game about nutrition and fitness? That sounds ~~awful~~ right up my alley. I look at the back of the box and see everything I never knew I wanted in a board game: human pawns wearing cloth jerseys that I fatten with soy beans! And wait, are some of them wearing Olympic medals around their necks? SOLD

FUN FACT: I would have happily paid the full $5 but the angel behind the counter inexplicably gave me half off. I think he could see this game would find a good forever home with me. It’s possible I was beaming. It’s possible he was high. It’s possible things just work out sometimes.

how it plays

This is a roll and move game. Your pawn starts the game with 20 lbs (=20 soy beans) and $200. As you move around the board your weight and purse will change: you may over-eat, injure yourself, buy new gym equipment, open a new business, try a new diet, etc. The goal is to have the most money in the end.

There are four areas of the board with corresponding decks of cards: COUNTRY CLUB, HEALTH CLUB, SPORTS and OLYMPICS. These, too, will be either positive, negative or neutral to your weight or purse. The OLYMPICS cards may award you a bronze, silver or gold medal that will be worth money at the end of the game.

The board also includes spaces for BREAKFAST, LUNCH and DINNER. When landing here you roll two dice, look at the menu for the corresponding meal and read out the entry to learn the consequences of your meal.

The most dreaded space on the board was easily the BET YOUR STRENGTH space. The player who lands on this space is meant to bet how many of a specific exercise they can do, while other players can choose to bet against them. A player cannot bet in support of a player; they may only bet against the player or choose not to bet. If the player that bet their strength wins, all players that bet against them pay the bettor $50. The majority of our group politely chose to ignore this space and not bet their strength, but we did see a few sit-ups during game play.

Oh, and did I mention you have to guess your pawn’s weight at the end of the game? How many lbs (=soy beans) are you packing? A successful guess nets you $50.

After resolving your weight guess, you pay $20 per 1lb to remove all weight that you had when hitting the scale.

The game ends when all players land in the center and have gone through all necessary accounting: guessing their weight, paying to remove all weight and finally resolving Olympic medals. As in life, the player with the most money wins.

how it went

This game is a snapshot in time, and I love that. I will not sit here and argue that in 2017 we have nutrition figured out; that is demonstrably untrue. Still it is funny to read the weight effect of certain meals in this 1988 game. This led us to great fun by pitching our own meal ideas during the game just to illustrate this disconnect. Easily my favorite came from Bill when he offered, “You had cocaine and a watermelon. Gain 7 lbs.”

I admire the choice to add a period to the end of the tagline, a detail that was not lost on me. This game is a fun way for the whole family to battle the bulge. This is a fact. I like the passive confidence.

Keeping track of your pawn’s weight is harder than it sounds – the spiral game board takes awhile to get through and it is difficult to focus on the weight enough to maintain a clear accounting in your head. I chose the “addition and subtraction” strategy but honestly I got very lucky with the least amount of weight change. Another player tried to start all initial 20 lbs in the front of the jersey and keeping changes to the rear side of the jersey, a strategy abandoned at some point due to storage limitations.

It might be worth noting that three of our four players were able to guess their pawn’s weight within the acceptable error margin of 3 lbs. In the fourth player’s defense, she was carrying ever so much weight. I am not sure her jersey would have fit much more in it.

The more creative of our players enjoyed moulding their extra weight. Although somewhat limited, you can definitely control the location of your curves to a certain degree, and it can even lead to crowding in the small spaces of the game board.

I was quite pleased with the weight loss of my own pawn. I was downright skinny at the end, which made tracking my weight a breeze. But alas, as the gods of weight loss smiled down on me, the gods of cash bestowed their gifts on another player. And the richest player wins.

The practice of adding and removing beans to represent weight was novel for our group. I do think Heavenly Body lost an opportunity by focusing on weight and nutrition but ultimately awarding the richest player. The weight becomes little more than taxation, and if you were able to save up enough money then eating poorly and not working out was of little consequence. And I am not sure that’s what the designer was trying to convey with this game.

play or pass

Play those pounds off! Heavenly Body is trying to do a lot: roll and move, betting but with real-life exercise (!), chance cards, random dice rolling, tracking your weight. This game is a mess, but more importantly it’s a treasure in the they-could-never-make-this-today kind of way. The journey to the scale is long and lends itself to repetition, but with the right crowd you will find laughter, wtf moments and the unsung challenge of safely removing soy beans from your jersey without losing them.

Review: Barnabas Collins Dark Shadows Game

By jen On September 28, 2017 With No Comments

Review: Barnabas Collins Dark Shadows Game
Publisher: Milton Bradley
Year: 1969
Tagline: (none)

Board game cover showing Barnabas Collins character

how we met

It was one of those tales you hear that you think will never happen to you. My husband and I were driving down the road and saw a sign for collectibles down the road to the right a mile. We brake, turn and get to a very full, very fairly priced antique / junk store.

In the back room, the proprietor offered stereo equipment, vinyl and many board games. I looked through several of the games before deciding on four to purchase. I go to pay. That’s when it happened. That thing that will never happen.

He said, “I never do this, but do you want to look through the basement? There’s lots of games down there.”

Um, yeah.

I picked up a lot of games that day, in various conditions. Some to part out, some to try and save, some because I didn’t know wtf they are. Many of them were games I knew of but never expected to find in one place. This – this dark basement, sometimes lit only by my phone – this is where I met Barnabas. And his fangs, which I have avoided touching even to this day.

how it plays

This game could not be more simple. It’s a set collection game where you have a cardboard stand in front of you just waiting to house a glow-in-the-dark skeleton. All of the skeleton pieces reside in a coffin in the middle of the table. The coffin also contains a number of wooden stakes!

You spin a spinner and it lands on either a specific body part, a ring or a stake. If you:

how it went

As happy as I am to own this game, I’ll admit it’s barely a game. It is completely dependent upon chance. The most challenging aspect is keeping your cardboard stand upright. (Although some of our group are challenged with spinners because it is an art that has been lost in this day and age.)

Even though the gameplay is simple, it’s not necessarily dull. It’s a short-cycle race and every spin counts. Short- and sweet-like.

The game was not proof against the curse of my friend John, who seems to always roll low, always end up down the coal chute, always hit the red lights, always get the cold fries. He spun more stakes than that 48-year-old game had ever seen, I feel certain of it.

play or pass

Play. For one thing this game is worth a decent amount of money. For another thing even if you only pull this game out once a year around Halloween, that’s a pretty awesome tradition. And if you decide to assign curses or luck to the losers or winners, well, then I don’t really have anything to do with that. But spin well, friends!

If you find this game used, make sure that it contains the skeleton bits for four full skeletons. Most of the used versions are missing the fangs, which does not impact gameplay. And the fangs are old and gross at best.

Review: Circulation

By jen On September 28, 2017 With No Comments

Review: Circulation: An Incredible Journey
Publisher: Teaching Concepts
Year: 1974
Tagline: Defy Unexpected Dangers at Every Turn as You Complete Your Vital Mission

how we met

It was a Saturday, and warm. I found Circulation in a thrift store in SE Wisconsin. The cover is dated and funny. I could not wait to get into that weird, cartoon body and start poking around.

Inventory is one of the steps I enjoy after buying a used game, where I check whether it has all the pieces. When I unfolded the board for Circulation, my love grew deeper. This trifold monster is a whopping 22″x33″ (which is incidentally the only thing that this game has in common with Axis & Allies 1942). When I saw the tokens titled GASEOUS WASTE and RENAL WASTE my intrigue was at full-pitch. Could this finally be the game that teaches me about my circulatory system by bewitching me with its charming artwork and cheeky humor? SOLD

how it plays

Circulation is a spin and move game involving pick up and deliver. Your pawn is a plasma tray and begins the game with a white blood cell. Your job is to travel through veins and arteries to pick up food and oxygen in certain areas of the body and deliver them to other areas of the body. Upon delivery, though, your plasma tray obtains waste that must be disposed of before continuing your “incredible journey.”

Your ultimate goal is to deliver food and oxygen to the head, both arms and both legs. In the process you must dispose of gaseous waste through the lungs and renal waste through the kidneys.

If you are an unlucky spinner, you may find yourself in an EMERGENCY situation that is essentially a side-quest that must be completed before you can continue with whatever you were doing (prompted by landing on EMERGENCY with the spinner and drawing a card from the EMERGENCY deck). One example of an emergency situation might be that you are suddenly being chased by an aggressive dog and need to deliver food and oxygen to your leg in order to run faster.

There are four spots on the board called CIRCULATE that require you draw a card from the CIRCULATE deck and immediately move to whatever location is indicated. This may sound innocuous but you will never know this pain until you have played Circulation. It’s a bitch to get around, so a free trip across the board can be acutely disheartening if it’s in the wrong direction.

Finally there are spots on the board marked GERM ATTACK that cause you to lose your white blood cell. If it has already been lost then you must obtain another in your bone marrow – embarking on a new “incredible journey.” If it has not been lost there is no real impact, until you need a white blood cell, such as in an EMERGENCY.

how it went

Incredible Journey is right. The veins and arteries dictate which direction you can move (you know, like real life) so even though you might only need to move an inch or two as the crow flies, you must instead travel as the plasma flows. So you go over there, up a bit, just to the right, shift down then make your way up and avoid all pitfalls. And this travel must happen several times to win the game. Realistic? Sure. But as far as I know plasma is not sentient, and it was cruel to make us travel this way.

Circulation has very few ratings and even fewer comments on BGG. A few comments specifically mentioned a problem with repetition, and I must strongly agree with that warning. I want to strengthen that warning and continue to send it out into the wilderness.

We did all land on GERM ATTACK during play, but the only consequences were to me when my EMERGENCY card required a white blood cell, which I had lost in a previous GERM ATTACK. No big deal. I was immediately out of the game, essentially, since the travel to obtain the new white blood cell and continue on my “incredible journey” was brutal (don’t get me wrong, I played until the bitter end – I just didn’t stand a chance).

Incidentally, landing on EMERGENCY can cause you to carry waste throughout the body. You may drop off waste during an EMERGENCY but are not required to. If it had happened to all of us at once, our hero could have gone septic.

This game is meant to be educational, but I believe the designers confused educational with thematic. It’s thematic to its core, but I did not learn a thing. It seemed as though a few of the CIRCULATE cards were meant to teach small bits of trivia, but we did not land on CIRCULATE once in the entire game. There are proper names for certain areas of the body on the board, but there is no reason to even read them unless you are being directed there by a CIRCULATE card.

One thing I will say for this game is that it encouraged us to cheer for each other. We wanted to move on in our lives, so we were very supportive competitors hoping each person would win immediately. I guess that’s educational, in its own way.

play or pass

Save yourself and pass. My gaming group started out charmed by the plasma trays, the tokens and the gigantic board. It took a couple of turns before the realization of our next 30 minutes or so began to set in. My friends have a lot of patience for my games, and I am concerned that this one set me back a bit in their favor. I should probably say something nice about them to make up for it.

Review: The Ungame

By jen On September 27, 2017 With No Comments

Review: The Ungame
Publisher: The Ungame Company
Year: 1973
Tagline: tell it like it is …with

how we met

My love of old, quirky board games runs deep. My sister shares this appreciation, and she is actually guilty of introducing me to The Ungame. Yes I said guilty.

She texted me the first time she played. It was winter, one of those midwest nights where the snow outside makes everything inside seem warm and homey. The picture was her lovely hand over a board, holding a card that says, “Say something about angels.”

It was several months before I found The Ungame at a thrift store. All that time had passed and suddenly I was exposed to no less than two copies of The Ungame in the same location, each less than $2. It was as though I was finally ready. I opted for the one that still had the parts sealed.

FUN FACT: the copy my sister purchased at thrift also boasted sealed pieces. Curiouser and curiouser…

I immediately texted my sister the good news, to which she replied, “Now you can experience the unfun of The Ungame.”

how it plays

Let me say this for the first time: The Ungame is what it is. It is a roll and move game where the majority of rolls will result in you drawing a card challenging you to share a personal thought or anecdote with your fellow players.

Other times you may land on a square that will sanctimoniously judge how your day has gone and possibly send you to other areas of the board accordingly, such as Impatient Island, Complaint Campground, Cheerful Chalet, Happy House or some other awful place.

Once you roll and move initially, you introduce your pawn into a never-ending circle. There is no end, just another lap around the board. The rules say that you decide the finish by deciding the game length up front. Don’t forget to do that!

The game does have pawns and a die. It has a board and cards. It is otherwise not even trying to be a game.

how it went

It is called The Ungame, and it is what it is. My joke above about the pawns and die being unused is really just a shaky acknowledgment about what I brought into the lives of my loved ones.

My game group was patient and fun with The Ungame. We are quite possibly one of the most sarcastic foursomes you could hope to expose to this game. But – and here it is – even we were sharing and learning at times amidst our snarky fun. The Ungame was like water finding all of our cracks and running through, leaving us wondering why we decide to take one thing seriously and poke fun at another. But alas these anecdotal moments were few and far between.

My version of the game offers two decks of cards: Lighthearted and Deep Understanding. We primarily stuck to Deep Understanding because they seemed a bit more…interesting. This deck also contained a few cards that remind you how to be a good ungamer.

We foolishly did not set a time limit on the game when we set out on our circular, never-ending journey. We let the game conclude organically when we were all ready to stop torturing ourselves and each other. Actually it was just after that point.

We did find ways to add witty banter to the mix. My favorite quip was Keri asking if I needed to go to the Sarcastic Silo, which I spent the next 10-15 seconds looking for on the board before realizing it didn’t exist.

play or pass

Pass. Here’s the thing: the same part of me that loves these weird, old games wants to tell you how lucky you are to find The Ungame, pick it up and play it with your close people. How so many issues in this world could be solved by more communication. How there is an inherent nobility in giving a voice to those that would not otherwise speak up. How difficult it is to fault The Ungame in pursuit of these lofty goals.

But The Ungame is for ages 5-105; it is not trying to win you over, and it doesn’t. Its parts were sealed because it was unplayed; it is daring you to play it, and you can’t. It is called The Ungame; it is not trying to be a game, and it isn’t.

Finding The Ungame at thrift is not uncommon. I have seen it probably eight times since I bought it. And if you do try out The Ungame, you have my enthusiastic support. Does anyone care what you have to say about earthquakes or tornadoes? Of course not. But say it anyway because that is the (un)game.

Review: Ad Liners

Review: Heavenly Body

Review: Barnabas Collins Dark Shadows Game

Review: Circulation

Review: The Ungame

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Review: Ad Liners

Review: Heavenly Body

Review: Barnabas Collins Dark Shadows Game

Review: Circulation

Review: The Ungame

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