The Simple Goodness of Friends

Yesterday, we went down to a friend's house to play board/card games. Typically, people gather at our house, but this time we changed things up a bit! So, he and his wife set up a large table to accomodate the 7 of us, and we all brought various games to play. Within 5 hours, we managed to play 3 games (Killer Bunnies, Apples to Apples, and Estimated Time to Invasion), eat a bunch of chili and Doritos, and laugh so hard many of us were crying.

Killer Bunnies was ridiculously complicated & involved us playing down cards in a certain order so we could equip our own bunnies with weapons to attack other players' bunnies. The object of the game was to have a winning carrot, which was drawn randomly. And as far as I can tell, killing other bunnies didn't really increase chances of getting carrots. Todd's wife, Nadeen won that one, although I don't think any of us are quite sure if we even played the game right!


Apples to Apples had us in tears over certain combinations, like someone pitching in "Mahatma Gandhi" for contention in description what is "Tempermental"! And we all went off into gales of laughter when "Helen Keller" was selected for the best fit of what is "Hot"! Ken managed to snag the requisite number of cards to win the game.

Estimated Time to Invasion had a steep learning curve, but a year and a half ago, Jason & I had helped playtest it (we're even listed as Human Test Subjects in the rules!), so some of it started coming back partway through the game. In the end, the most mild-mannered of us all turned out to be the alien & we'd been unwittingly helping him in his conquest to take over Earth. I'd misread a card & given up early on in his conquest & painted a convincing picture of this fact, so he didn't lay damage too thickly on me. And then it turned out that I had a card that allowed me to squeak by on the narrowest of margins and wind up winning the game.

It was just awesome to hang out with these people, meet our hosts' new rambunctious dog, Diamond, and have hours and hours of silly fun! Hanging out with friends like this just can't be beat!