Foggy memories of Sunday Game Night
From: Nathan
To: Game Friends
Game Friends,
Sunday Game Night continues this Sunday at 5pm at my apartment. If it’s nice out, we’ll fire up the grill. Please let me know if you’re coming and please bring food or drink to share.
See you Sunday,
Nathan
P.S. I was thinking recently about some of the classic board game movies and I suddenly had a vague recollection of seeing Dirty Dancing: Hanabi Nights several years ago. As I recall, it involved a high school student learning about a foreign culture through card games and falling in love with the man who was teaching her how to play. The only scene I can remember is the one where the young woman is just learning and keeps playing cards she was supposed to discard and the foreign man is totally frustrated and says something about how he can’t teach her. Has anybody else seen this movie and do you remember any other details? I think they reconcile later but I can’t remember why/how.
P.P.S. Or do you have any other favorite board game movies?
From: Kyle
To: Game Friends
My favorite board game movie is the one where a man gets paid to hunt down board games that are out of control. The question is, in the future, when a board game is so amazingly fun that it seems alive, how do you tell the difference between a board game and a human? And, is a sufficiently advanced board game… better than a human?
From: Kate
To: Game Friends
I mean, you guys. Jumanji.
In the jungle you must wait until the dice read five or eight.
And don’t get me started on the giant spiders in the attic. No freaking way.
From: Abe
To: Game Friends
My favorite would have to be TRON: Snake Eyes. I’m sure I’m not the only one who, as a kid, fancied that dice might actually be alive inside the board game and fighting little battles to see what numbers they roll. And then I just love the idea that all the dice have been taken over by the ruthless Evil One. Then a human who’s trying to figure out what the heck is going on gets TURNED INTO A DIE and has to help restore randomness to the system in order to allow the Players to roll some fricken’ sixes once in while!
From: James
To: Game Friends
From: Nathan
To: Game Friends
Kyle, are you talking about the cult classic Board Runner? I still remember the famous monologue:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… meeples on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched D12s glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time… to roll the die.”
From: Kyle
To: Game Friends
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand, when the DM rolls on the random encounter table.
A tortoise appears in front of you. Roll initiative.
You rolled a 14, plus your modifier is 15. The tortoise crit fails.
You draw your sword, ready an action, and 5-foot adjust towards the tortoise. The sand is unstable here, roll a dex check.
Yeah because the sand is unstable. Just roll it. Ok 8 and 1 is 9. You slip in the sand and as you do, you catch the tortoise’s leg with your boot.
The tortoise makes a dex check and crit fails. It lurches uphill and swings back down, rolls completely over on its shell.
Tortoise’s turn. It’s gonna make a str check and an acrobatics check to roll over. It crit fails both. Tortoise just kind of wiggles in a comically eccentric circle in the sand, legs flailing in the sun.
Your turn.
Ok you make a str check to upright the tortoise, and it’s gonna roll to assist.
You got 16 so . . . no 14 and 2 is 16. Yeah, a 15 is still only +2.
So you roll high enough to try but the tortoise crit failed. Yeah, it tips up on edge with you lifting, but then jerks around and rolls like a wheel away from you down the dune, then wobbles like a spinning coin and comes to a stop on its back again, 15 meters down slope. What? Yeah it’s like 300 pounds, a Galapagos tortoise or something.
No, it’s just there, you don’t know how it got there.
Tortoise tries to get up again.
Ok, tortoise crit fails. It pulls a hamstring flailing it’s legs.
Tortoises totally have hamstrings.
Your turn.
What do you mean, you’re not helping?