Games - Steve Anderson, Freelance Actor and Writer (SGAcreative.com)

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LET'S PLAY A GAME!

Part One: Games I've Created

HAUNTS:
A Game of Spooks & Spectres

Players: 2-8 Time: 1 hour or less

"C'mon, it's just an old house.
What are you, chicken?"

Years ago, you were a young house, warm and friendly, a home. Now you're old and creaky, swirling in mist, filled with cobwebs. Haunted, they say. You and your spooky old friends.

Well, far be it from you to disappoint your fans. So you’ll rattle your chains, creak your stairs, gather up all the mist and fog you can muster, send frat boys running for the hills, be poked and prodded by the ghost hunters—and if you’re very lucky, maybe you’ll top the charts at America’s Most Haunted. But beware the Skeptics--they'll turn you all into forgotten old relics!

Publish
Or
Perish

A Game of Academic Life

"Welcome to campus! As a new member of the faculty, you're joining a small but enthusiastic humanities program. We're happy to have a new full-time teacher, a new full-time adviser, a new full-time administrator, a new full-time researcher, and a new full-time scholar. Oh, but did we mention, they're all you?"

No, they didn't mention. Nor did they mention that the only way out is to beat out all the competition for one of the few tenure-track jobs on the market. How? Not by administrating, and certainly not by teaching. No, starting with what little you learned in grad school and adding whatever you can find time to learn in the midst of a full load of teaching, advising, and administrating, you're going to Publish. Or Perish.

Part Two: Other Games I Like

My wife Rhonda and I absolutely love playing games.

Whenever there’s a free evening, we’ll probably spend it playing traditional two-player games—or a modern variation. Some particular favorites:

Canasta - Fifteen cards to begin with. The more you draw, the easier it’ll be to meld, but the harder it’ll become to go out.

Cribbage - Play your cards and move your pegs—a card game and board game in one.

Mancala - As much a puzzle as a game—move your stones along the row of bowls carved into the wooden playing board as you set up moves for yourself; if you play right, you can get turn after turn after turn.

Ultimate Rummy and Phase10 - the mechanics of traditional rummy expand to make the required meld harder and harder with each hand.

When there’s a whole free weekend—a rare occurrence, as you’d imagine—we’re liable to invite friends over and make a full-scale game party out of it. What kind of game party? That depends on who’s available.

With non-gamers or a mixed group, we’ll go with fast-paced, easy-to-learn games like:

Scattergories - The most successful attempt at a wordgame for parties we’ve tried. You have about sixty seconds to come up with a word or phrase that fits into each of a list of categories—but your answers all have to start with the same random letter... and you only get points for answers no one else thought of.

Cranium - Like Pictionary for the ‘90s. You’re still trying to communicate clues to your partner, but now you only sometimes get to draw your clues. Other times, you’re forced to sing, act, sculpt, spell backwards, or answer a multiple-choice question.

Hoopla - Cranium for the ‘00s. You’re all on one team together, competing against the clock. It’s funny, it’s frantic, and most of all, it’s fast!

Apples to Apples - Quick! Which is most "noble," Elvis Presley, the Grand Canyon, or a Model T? Fast-paced, silly, mind-bending fun.

With the right kind of friends, like Sarah and Dan, out come much, much sillier, goofier games:

Chez Geek - Remember Pay Day and Monopoly and Life, where you were trying to get out on your own and get rich? Well, no more! In Chez Geek (and variants like Chez Greek and Chez Goth), you’re college students who want nothing more than to hang out, do some shopping, get some nookie, and generally slack off. As long as you can slack off more than anyone else.

Munchkin - Everything they used to say about D&D, but with a Steve Jackson sense of humor. Loan the DM your comic books and you’ll go up a level, but beware: that puny monster you’re fighting might turn out to be the far-more-powerful Last Of Its Race. (Also available in variants like Star Munchkin, Munchkin Fu, and the Goth Munchkin Bites.)

Lord of the Fries - You and your friends are working in the kitchen of a fast-food restaurant, competing to fill the customers’ orders. Oh, and did I mention you're all zombies? Cow meat! Yum!

Gimme the Brain - Same fast-food restaurant, but now you have new tasks to perform. Unfortunately, you only have one brain between the lot of you.

Huzzah! - The same quirky, off-beat sense of humor that makes Lord of the Fries and Gimme the Brain a hit, now turns to life as a performer at a Renaissance Faire. Entertain enough people, and they’ll mention you on their comment cards at day’s end, meaning you’ll get the contract to come back next year. But the owner of the Faire is wandering from stage to stage, and everything the crowd likes, he hates.

Kill Doctor Lucky - A wickedly clever spoof of Clue, in which rather than trying to solve the mystery, you’re trying to commit the murder yourself—but only when no one can see you. (Also amusing is Save Doctor Lucky, a prequel set on board the Titanic. Save the good man from drowning, but there’s no point being a hero unless someone sees you!)

NOTE: If you haven't noticed, yes, we love the Cheapass Games company, maker of Lord of the Fries, Gimme the Brain, Kill Doctor Lucky, Save Doctor Lucky, Huzzah!, Witch Trial, and dozens of other inexpensive but entertaining games. In fact, the only Cheapass Game we've tried and not liked is Unexploded Cow, which we just didn't understand.

And with just the right group, like our college friends James and Tom, we’ll dig out games that are thoroughly bizarre—and games that sound like they’d be in extraordinarily poor taste, but are, in fact, great fun.

Cosmic Wimpout - An otherworldly dice game in which you’ll clear a flash, risk a train wreck, or possibly end up being spat out of the universe like a watermelon seed.

Family Business - Chicago mobs of the ‘20s. You’re putting out contracts on other players’ mobsters, seeking police protection, and trying to avoid the devastating St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Nuclear War - "Do you have change for 100,000 people?"

Credo - A thoroughly irreverent card game based on the Council of Nicea. Leverage your political influence to get your sect’s beliefs enshrined forever as part of the Nicean Creed: "We believe in....." (This game appears to be out of print. If anyone knows where we can get a copy of our own, please be in touch.)

And on rare occasions, perhaps once a year, we’ll also play role-playing games. In college, we had great fun with an ongoing, free-form, character-based RPG (it was based on the Star Trek: The Role-Playing Game system, but I think that was incidental); I even DM'd two full ST:RPG campaigns one summer.

And our friend James has developed and run an amazing, brand-new LARP each of the last four summers--but he's just moved away to the Midwest, so we're going into withdrawal.

(Anyone who knows of a good, character-based RPG in the greater Harrisburg area that might be open to new players, please drop us a line. Character-driven, though, please--I've had my fill of linear hack'n'slash.)

And... well, all right, yeah, there is one more category, I suppose: video games.

When business is slow (and not when I'm on the clock, don't worry), I can get downright obsessive about playing games on my PC. Some of my all-time favorites

Myst - Beautiful. Entrancing. And hard but solveable, unlike the sequels, where a hints ‘n tips website is pretty much standard equipment.

DS9: The Fallen - I'm a sucker for games based on favorite TV shows and movies, and I've been sorely disappointed time after time... except with this one. It’s a first-person shooter, but you get three completely different sets of abilities and challenges and maps depending on which character you choose—and it makes terrific use of phasers, tricorders, and other Star Trek technology. It’s also very nicely designed so that the challenges get harder as you get more comfortable with the controls and as your weapons get better.

Gettysburg - Top-down military re-creation at the company and brigade level. You’re giving orders to small groups of soldiers—advance, retreat, hold, form a column, form a battle line—so it’s not the blood-and-guts of an FPS, but it’s also not the total abstraction of a grid-based strategy game.

Grand Theft Auto I - The original game (and GTA: London), back when it was a top-down game so that it feels like driving Hot Wheels cars and the violence, though abundant, is thoroughly un-realistic. I do play FPS games and flight sims and first-person driving games on occasion, but first-person bloodbath? Not my style.

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