There’s an Adventure Time Board Game? Did you know this? I didn’t. Not until my friend sent it to me to test, anyway.
I didn’t even know what Adventure Time was, since I’m neither a stoner or a 4-year-old kid. Basically it’s a cartoon that was made for grown-ups but then kids loved it and totally missed the stoner humour of it. It made tons of money, and now it has a board game, marketed directly to kids, not grown-ups. Except I ended up with me.
The git of the game is to build an epic burrito — stoner food. You have all these little plastic pieces in the shapes of watermelon slices, grapes, and pizza and you have to collect a bunch of them and roll them into a burrito before your opponents. But the game has major flaws. You basically just keep stealing each other’s pieces and no one can win. And the educational part of the game where kids have to understand which items are flat, round, juicy, etc. and choose them accordingly for the burrito, is…well, dumb.
So how do we make this game better? my brother and I wondered.
Add beer. So he and his girlfriend split a Dominus Vobiscum Lupulus Beer from Microbrasserie Charlevoix. At 10%, and coming in a wine-sized bottle, it hits hard. We set ourselves up at my place and made our own 5 à 7 to get through the game.
Not even the beer could save this one, though.
Fortunately, we had a fallback: Memory Challenge Cooking. Another not so great game, but made better with a few rules tweaks. You’re supposed to turn over two tiles and hope they match, and when they don’t you turn both back upside-down and pick two more. Like any basic memory game you have to remember where the tiles that match were and turn the right ones over next time. To make it better, however, we took a page from the Ugly match game, where you keep the tiles turned over and when you find ones that match you have to grab them before your opponents do. When you both grab the same tiles at the same time, the first one to yell “Ugly ugly ugly!” gets the contested tile.
In our game, we changed the yell to “yummy yummy yummy.” And if you’ve never played a violent drinking game before, you’re in for a treat. Some people’s reactions slow down, some people get more into it and almost knock over their beer, and some people who don’t drink beer with gluten (me) just watch the whole thing as a social study.
It was pretty amazing. I can’t really think of a better way to spend a sunny afternoon than with something refreshing, good friends, and a board game that requires yelling.
We sure turned lemons into lemonade, by taking some not-so-great games and making them better. Who said cheaters never prosper?
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