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A for Effort. C- for Results: Bad Teacher
I'll Have a Pint of Bitter and a Night of Comedy Please
Going for Broke
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The credit crunch is coming to influence every single sphere of our lives. Utility bills are up, taxes are rising to cover national debts and even the humble 99 flake will now requires a down payment of 75p upon order, just in case you become insolvent in the time it takes to make and flake it.
But the current inflation is hitting some people in the place it hurts most: board gamers. It’s not just a simple matter of having to play Connect 9 in order to achieve what was a Connect 4 in 2007, nor that the Game of Life now has squares marked “Wonga.com revokes your loan – you have three minutes to vacate your premises before the heavies come round.” Inflation has damaged some of our most beloved board games irreparably.
Scrabble has become virtually unplayable since all the vowels are now worth the same as a letter ‘K’, whilst ‘J’s, ‘X’s, ‘Q’s and ‘Z’s have all been commandeered for Bankers-Only versions of the game. There is now an illicit black market in these premium letters, with some maverick dealers offering a ‘!’ for twenty points if anyone is daring enough to use a sub-Saharan click in a championship match. Monopoly has been similarly ravaged by the economic instability of the day. Old Kent Road is now so dilapidated that once you have four houses on it, you don’t buy a hotel, you are just the owner of a dangerous council estate. Meanwhile any hotel on Pentonville Road is actually rebranded as a brothel, Free Parking isn’t any more and is patrolled by ruthless Nigerian traffic wardens and anything built on Mayfair or Park Lane is immediately populated by a homeless man slumming it in style. The pieces have also been replaced, so that instead of a top hat, a Scottie dog and an iron there’s now a beanie hat, a pit bull and a syringe.
But perhaps the game that has been hit hardest by these turbulent times is Risk. Reflecting as it does the international nature of the financial meltdown, this once much loved parlour game has fallen into disrepair as players roll the dice to see if they have enough money to move their armies beyond their borders, only to find them ill-equipped, demotivated and suffering from battle fatigue. Ultimately it just becomes a bitter war of attrition to stop your own pieces revolting against you and plunging your already pitiful empire into civil war. Roll anything less than a three and you’re Ceausescued, whilst anything between a four and a nine means that your power relies solely on intimidation by your secret police. Your only hope is to keep rolling double figures and gently spread your tendrils of doom into surrounding territories until you finally grind out a miserable North Korea-style one-party state over the entire face of the earth. If you’re losing the only real tactic is to hope for a natural disaster (luckily, this being a board game, tectonic activity is fairly easy to simulate by just picking it up, as is attack by a radioactive monster if you own a pet.)
Right, I’m now off to play Cluedo to see if it’s possible to murder a rural vicar armed with nothing more than a giro book and some broken NHS spectacles.
Written by Ben Van der Velde for LifeArcade!
24th June 2011
Twitter: @benvandervelde
Web: www.benvandervelde.com