Oh no.
We were having our weekly board game night when my friend said he had something new for us to try. She took out a pretty big box, but nothing crazy, and then passes it to me. Holy shit. It was like being passed a piece of a neutron star. I basically fell to the floor from the sudden and immense weight I felt. It was like being passed what you were told was a basketball and catching a medicine ball.
I wondered what could be in there. Of course the only thing I knew for sure was that learning the rules would take the majority of the night. No party game weighs as much as four elephants stacked on top of one another. We opened the box and saw dozens of figures packed in like sardines, head to foot, groin to groin.
I struggled to put the box on the table, working up a sweat and nearly vomiting from exertion. The second we opened it and started taking out the game pieces I knew for a fact that we were never getting this box to close the right way again. Like a sleeping bag with an impossibly tight carrying case.
Each of the figurines was individually painted and had a real weight to them. They were truly beautiful, surely worth the several hundred dollars my friend must have spent for the game. The rule book was the size of an XYZ edition of the encyclopedia. We took the time to set up, spreading out the dozens of pieces to their predetermined place, and then distributing the thousands of resource tokens in a specific order to each of the players.
We tried to watch a video on how to play, but it was 45 minutes long and included phrases like “Phase Six,” and “at the end of the second planning round.” One of my friends started openly weeping at this point.
Anyway, we just ended up playing Codenames.
