Blog Archives
Blorpassonne
In my quest to find activities that will hold the interest of children with a five-year age gap, I routinely find myself playing board games that normally wouldn’t register more than a fraction of my attention. Blorp!, for example.
What is Blorp!, you ask? Apart from being a noise my offspring produce when they don’t want to empty the dishwasher or hang up their towels, a blorp is apparently the answer to what Dr. Seuss would animate for a David Cronenberg flick. These are queasy creatures in three colors that communicate by, uh, farting confetti at one another. Garth Kaufmann, who both designed and did the illustrating, sure has a knack for tongues, eyeballs, and tendrils, I’ll tell you that much.
Social Deduction’s Last Gleaming
Of all the many virtues a board game may hold, brevity seems to be the most dazzling. “It’s Game X but shorter!” we say, breathless at the prospect of compressing each hour of play into forty-five minutes, half an hour, the heartbeat of a hummingbird. It’s like shortening recess for adults.
And hey, I get it. Really. After all, a number of positive improvements are directly connected to time-saving measures. Decreased waits between turns, fewer needless components to fiddle with, decisions spaces that are honed rather than sprawling. It’s easy to confuse the distinction between sharp and slender.
Speaking of which, The Menace Among Us is Battlestar Galactica in forty minutes. Kinda-sorta.
Nevermore Evermore
What does the Nevermore card game have to do with Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem “The Raven”? Good question! The ever-present burden of memory? Nope. The terrible knowledge that we already know the answers to every single one of our most pressing questions, it’s just that we don’t like those answers? Not at all. The uncomprehending universe to which we pose our—
Okay, enough of that. The correct answer is “Ravens. Just ravens.”
SPACE-BIFF! 