ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod
OHMYGOD, WHAT. HOW IS THIS REAL. I NEED A TEACHER OR POLICEMAN OR OTHER TRUSTED ADULT TO TELL ME HOW THIS IS REAL!!
Like, what even is Klotrix. I guess you have to answer trivia questions to find out???
UH, I GUESS NOT THEN. Never mind!
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HOW IS THIS REAL THOUGH.
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I had one of these when I was a kid—a “make your own Monopoly” kit (totally unlicensed, I’m sure) that allowed anyone with a home computer and printer to commit IP fraud make their very own, personalized Monopoly set! I don’t remember what I did with it, but if my fifth-grade-era custom game of Clue is any indicator, you were collecting $200 Paul-bucks when passing Nintendo and taking a ride on the McDonald’s Railroad.
These kids made one based on their Boy Scout troop, and ultimately (and sadly), the game found its way to Goodwill. Let’s dive in!
Here’s the board. (You can click here to zoom in if you’d like, and see the whole thing). Notable design choices include swapping out the streets of Atlantic City with locales like “the church b-ball court” and “Jeff’s coke” (ominously not capitalized) and replacing jail with a toilet, referred to as “the duker.”
The in-game currency has been replaced with “Boy scout Bucks,”—which were apparently never cut apart after they came out of the printer. Does that mean nobody ever played the game? Awww…
By far the best part of the game though is the “Bonehead” and “Prosperity” cards that replaced Chance and Community Chest:
F***ing Jeff, am I right?
Unsurprisingly, there’s an actual, legit Boy Scouts of America Monopoly out there, but that’s clearly not what these kids were going for; they were making a game based on their own camp and their own experiences. What a neat project. Also f*** Jeff for real though, seriously.
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I’m not going to make any Phoenix Wright puns, I’m not going to make any Phoenix Wright puns, I’m not—boy, this game looks like it’s Edge-worthy of a spot on anyone’s shelf; am I Wright, guys?!
I found “Jury Trial: The Sensational Courtroom Battle Board Game!” at one of my fine local thrift stores (you can tell it’s fancy when they keep the PS2 games locked inside a glass case), and it kind of looks amazing. I say “kind of,” only because this particular edition appeared to have been dunked in a dirty toilet.
Don’t be tempted to scroll past this dude’s case without reading it. FIGHT YOUR INSTINCT, if only for phrases like “sex and flesh work in advertising” and “their message is painted on my butt.”
…I’m already regretting not buying this game, toilet or no. Continue reading
…Okay, so I actually bought this one and put it in my house. (After hearing about it on the Flip the Table podcast, I couldn’t resist.) This is a game that subverts board game conventions—but not in the “lol, this space says I’m incontinent now*” (*this is an actual space) way that The Game of REAL Life does it. Rather–
(Here’s a fun game—find the rule that would get you Hulk Hogan’d from your job in 2015) Continue reading
Okay, okay. I bet THIS GAME’S going to be fun. How can this not be fun, look how much fun that silhouette is having in those sensible dancing shoes.
I AM READY!!
A quick aside before we launch into today’s post. The yard sales weren’t really biting all that much this weekend—one of the more exciting ones I stopped at was selling a massage table and, uhh, this book to go along with it (making me question what sorts of things went on on that massage table)—but I did want to share this one craigslist ad I found:
SO CREEPY! Anyway, back to BOARD GAME WEEK, where nothing’s ever creepy.
Yesterday’s game was BORING. Do you have anything with some action? Maybe some space ships?? Maybe some space ships…in waterspout?? [Edit: that was supposed to say “outer-space” but I’m not always great at typing.]
YESSSS!! GALACTIC WARFARE!!! THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT! CLEAN-UP ON AISLE DEATH!!
Let’s just pop this baby open, and…
Here’s a game that’s the complete opposite of The Game of Real Life:
Instead of the fun(?) of simulated date rape (I’m sorry; it’s LITERALLY IN THE GAME I’M SORRY), here we have a game about learning to communicate with one another. I’ll let this reviewer from Amazon dot com explain it:
Finally!, a board game where you sit quietly and do nothing. I was getting tired of staring at this wall. Continue reading
It’s BOARD GAME WEEK here at Yardsaling to Adventure!, that special time of year when we commemorate the fact that I saw a bunch of really strange board games at the thrift store this past Saturday (the same one with the questionable gumball machine).
First up:
It’s The Game of REAL Life! Yes, the game that does away with all that phony stuff from the actual Game of Life, like going to college, getting married and winning the lottery, and replaces it with things like doing blow, and watching your children die! Also instead of driving around in little plastic cars, all the game pieces are f***ing rocks.
You can tell this is gonna be a fun one, because it has a “you got aborted” space:
…And believe it or not that’s not even close to the worst one in the game. For example: Continue reading
It’s finally happening: I’m turning the camera around, and focusing on some of the weird stuff that I’m selling at my own yard sale. Hoisting myself by my own petard, as they say! Slipping on my own banana peel! Dropping an anvil on myself! I think the metaphor got away from me…
Anyway as you know we moved, and we did the thing that smart people do: shipped the entirety of our worldly possessions cross-country, and then decided to cull it down a bit, after realizing we couldn’t physically fit the amount of crap we’ve amassed over the years into our new house. (This is probably Lizo’s fault, since I never amass large piles of garbage.) It was either annex our neighbors’ property—which they seemed patently unwilling to agree to—or have a yard sale of our own.
This is what our yard sale looked like right after we’d finished setting it up. For comparison, here’s a shot I took at the end of the day:
As you can see, it would be exaggerating to say that business was good. It would also be exaggerating to say that any business happened at all.
We did have one customer, Bob, who was nice enough to give our weird collection of goods a once-over, all the while providing a colorful running commentary. “Those wooden spoons should be good for spankings!” he told me. “Yeahhhhh!!” (The way he said it sounded like he didn’t mean for misbehaving children.)
Then, as he was looking over some recipe books, there was “Vegetarian cooking?? That’s what FOOD eats! Ewwwwww!!” He actually said “eww” like that, like a child discovering belly-button lint. Later, as we were ringing up his purchases: “I’ll take the knives. …I need to go back and get dressed first, though.” (It’s at this point I should mention that he was wearing a pair of rubber overalls, with both of the straps down, and nothing else.) Bob was great. Things got a little awkward though when someone mentioned the Amy Winehouse documentary, and Bob muttered “another dead druggie.”
Oh, Bob.
Bob wasn’t our only customer, but he was one of maybe a dozen—most of which were neighbors who were out walking their dogs and wondering why we had the entire contents of a Sam Goody circa 2002 dumped out on our driveway. We were asked “did you guys advertise?” at least a half-dozen times, with “because I had no idea this was even happening” politely left unspoken. Then around 11:30, we had a freak thunderstorm (the first rain we’ve seen since moving here) and most of our stuff got water-logged. It was not a very good sale.
Where did we go wrong? Well for one, the house we’re renting is on a peninsula with a population smaller than my high school’s graduating class, so any yard sale we had here was doomed to failure. I guess in hindsight, too, I wish I hadn’t called out “early birds”—those people who show up before your scheduled start time—in my Craigslist ad like I did:
Also, our sign didn’t make it through the rain so good.
All-in-all I sort of hate yard sales now, so this is the end of the blog forever.
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Okay I lied. Here’s a sampling of some of the weird stuff we tried to sell to Bob!
We’re back! (A Dinosaur’s Story! Sorry, force of habit.)
In case you didn’t know, we recently took up and moved from Ohio (“The Buckeye State”) to California (“The It’s How Far Away??? State”). The drive took us four days, with me, my wife, our two bunnies, our turtle, my parents-in-law, and our collection of I-don’t-know-probably 74 house plants packed into two cars, driving along exactly one interstate for 12 hours a day and surviving on gas-station sandwiches and Pop-Tarts alone.
Here’s a video I took of the trip:
After taking a week to settle in/visit the redwood forest and the beaches/spin around in a chair waiting for the movers to show up with all our stuff, I hit the yard sales this Saturday morning—and already things are getting weird, in the best possible way.
This weekend alone I encountered:
And, this for sale at a locally-owned thrift store: Continue reading
Yardsaling to Adventure! 
