Tales of a Tabletop Gamer

If you play as many tabletop games as I do, you are bound to encounter some surprising events in the course of gameplay. Here's a sample.

If you haven't played The Totally Insane Card Game, you are totally missing out. It's like Uno on steroids. Besides a host of insane cards too many to name here, there are more familiar cards like Skip and Reverse. This particular story involves the Take 2 card, just like the Draw 2, except you take from your opponents, diminishing their hands while you increase your own. In Totally Insane, when a Take 2 is played on you, you have the option of playing another Take 2 on top of it, thereby passing 4 takes to the next player.

The game in question started with a Take 2, played by my brother-in-law Tim. I played a Take 2 on top of that. The next player, instead of taking 4, played another Take 2. Cries of, "Take 8," "Take 10," and "Take 12" rang out as everyone played their Take 2 cards, going around the table more than once.

Finally, somebody was out of Take 2 cards. It was Tim, the guy that started it all, who had to take 36 cards from the rest of us, emptying all our hands and ending the round. We each scored zero. Tim scored enough to end the game on turn one. We all won, he lost.

The most amazing part is that the very same thing happened again on a different game night. We played all our Take 2 cards first thing, Tim took all the cards from our hands, lost the game in one turn, and gave the rest of us a shared victory.

Infamous Disney Memo

You may have heard of a notorious memo once circulated through Disney's Animation Department.

When Disney Management in the eighties noted the box office failure of the film Young Sherlock Holmes, which I happen to like, by the way, they panicked. In an effort to distance themselves from this financial failure, someone conceived the not-so-brilliant idea of changing the name of their own picture Basil of Baker Street to a generic title: The Great Mouse Detective.

Disgusted, the animators and crew of Basil of Baker Street created a memo, supposedly from management, changing the names of all previous animated features. Here is a scan of that memo, preserved for posterity:

It is interesting to note that, in much more recent years, Disney and Pixar seem to have been plagued with the same mentality, giving us ludicrous titles like Tangled, Frozen, Brave, and worst of all, John Carter. Good movies; bad titles.

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