duh?!

Its been a while since I’ve played a good board game. I remember playing board games a lot more often. Monopoly, Clue, Life….all the classics, but with the internet and it’s countless game sites, the Nintendo DS handhelds and the high def Wii gaming system the board game has all but disappeared. The other night I went with a friend to my sister in-law’s house and before we bored each other with mundane conversation we decided to play a game.

First mistake, Trivial Pursuit. We did have choices though including the 20th anniversary edition (which was 8 years old already), the 60’s or Music. We opted for the anniversary edition. Second mistake. I say ‘we’ opted when it was really me that opted since I thought the diverse topics would show off our all-around knowledge of the world. OK so I was wrong! The game was horribly hard. We spun, moved our little pie wheel piece around the board to a color we thought we had a shot at answering correctly, got it wrong and moved on. This is basically how it went for a while. Hey, what about the 60’s? We all lived through them, we gotta be better at that one. We exchanged the cards for the new edition and we started fresh. We spun, moved our little pie wheel piece around the board to a color we thought we had a shot at answering correctly, got it wrong and moved on. Ok been there, done that. After a while we caught on that the answers were going to be a Kennedy (pick one, any one), Janis Joplin, Woodstock, Jack Nicklaus or Charles Manson depending on the category. I guess the writers at Hasbro only remembered a few highlights of the ten years the 60‘s encompassed.….that or they figured that somewhere down the road some dopes (like us) would play this edition believing that because we survived the 60’s we would know the answers.

One by one we got pieces to wedge into our pie wheel game piece. Even with our new insight the game went on and on with unanswered questions. So we made up our own rules. You now got a choice. If you landed on, let’s say….green, which is Sports, you got to chose which of two questions you wanted to answer. And when that didn’t help much, we resorted to charades with me stabbing the air and slitting my own throat with a mock knife to get them to say OJ Simpson in response to a Heisman Trophy question. I know it seemed more like cheating and less like playing but it made the stupidness we were feeling dissipate somewhat. In the end, my sister in-law won, but I think she had an advantage. She plied us with sweet and sour ooze stuffed Twizzlers (I kid you not) that I am sure sent a mind- numbing sugar rush to our brains. Ok, so I asked for them, but she really should have refused after we polished off the better part of a dozen Dunkin Donuts which thankfully doesn’t have the calorie count printed on the box.  It was late, we were all tired, nauseous from the Twizzlers and humbled by our dumbness so we thought we would leave but not before vowing to play again and get more answers right then wrong without cheating.