If your next Family Game Night includes these games, you should consider getting emancipated.

If you've learned anything about me, you should know that I'm a huge fan of games. Board games especially. But there are some board games that I never want to play again. Consider this a fair warning: the next time you ask me to play any of these games, I'm going to find your copy and set it on fire.

3) Monopoly.

I very well might have spent more hours playing Monopoly than any other copyrighted game in existence. This is because every house is required by social contract to have at least two copies of Monopoly:
The basic edition you can get for five dollars anywhere the free market exists.















And one of the umpteen-fucking-million "special editions" marked up to four times the cost of the original game, all so you can drive around with a football or Buzz Lightyear:


This, to a degree, is fine. If we're going to live in a world where I can waste all of my disposable income on sporting events and porn, other people should be allowed to waste their money on die-cast Steelers legends. Even the knock-off editions that fuck with the numbers and add weird cards are less bothersome than the basic premise of the game: trading.

The problem with trading in Monopoly is that it's pretty easy to figure out who's getting the better deal out of any particular trade. Holy shit, statistics has a purpose.

As such, the only trades that get made happen for one of two reasons: either to get the game over with, or to try to stay alive with weird deals that usually involve "immunity." Well, here's the only immunity I want: immunity from ever having to play this piece of shit game again.

2) Lost: The Game

Here's how I imagine this one went:

"Wow, this show is really popular!"

"Yeah, we should make a board game out of it! We can have the characters from the show, and the island, and the smoke monster, and everything!"

"Wow, this should be awesome! How do people win the game?"

"Well, the show's still got another four seasons before we know if anyone on the show has a happy ending... we'll leave that for the expansion pack!"

"So, you're saying we should leave our fans in limbo for four years?"

"I know what we can put on the box... "JUST LIKE THE TV SHOW!""


You know who lost the game? You did. You did by buying this waste of a good license.

(Also, this "The Game" bullshit needs to stop right. fucking. now.)

1) Apples to Apples


I will admit, the first time I played this game, I enjoyed it. (I was also wasted.) Since then, no matter what my BAC was, I've had no enjoyment from this game. Why, you ask? Because it's the same thing every fucking time.

"HAHA YOU PLAYED THE HITLER CARD! EDGY! A POINT FOR YOU!"

"HELEN KELLER HAD DISABILITIES! I'VE NEVER LOLED THIS HARD IN MY LIFE! POINT!"

"Edward R. Murrow? Who's that?" (Actual gameplay quote. In her defense, she was some sort of bio major, so it's indeed possible she's never read a book in her life.)

Look, there are a few hard and fast rules of comedy: If I have to explain it, it's not funny. Shock comedy loses its luster faster than anything else. And very few things are funny the fifteenth time. This game tends to combine all three of the Comedy Donts, and suffers from the biggest problem a game can have: tedium.

Every round is worth the exact same one point score. Every round contains fifteen seconds of thinking, two seconds to place your card in the center of the circle, and three minutes of waiting for someone else to pay attention and set something down. (If nothing else, though, this is a good time to drink.) This wouldn't be so bad if our group quit at the reccomended win condition. This length of game would take about 45 minutes, which is a fair amount of time to do something you don't really want to do if enough other people think you should. (Like class.) However, we like to go through the entire box every time we play, an endeavour that takes around three hours. Which, again, wouldn't be so bad if the game was three hours of flip a card, play a card, draw a card, pick a winner, repeat. It would even be fine if you were required to come up with your own responses, e.g. Match Game, Balderdash, or any other game that requires you to be funny. Not here.

My advice: if you buy this game, play through each card exactly once, laugh the appropriate amount of times at the "Hitler"+"Visionary" combo, and go back to playing a man's game, like Diplomacy.