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.