Lack of Quorum

Last night Jum had to work late, Wheelz called off sick and Carl ended up unexpectedly in Chicago (“Woah! How did I get here?”). That left me with one player for my Mutant Future game, Dane. As a normal rule of thumb I won’t run a role-playing game for just one player. Without a second player it just feels hollow to me. The genetically mangled horrors I had planned for the group will just have to wait two weeks.

So instead we scoped out the shelf full of boardgames that the nice folks at Armored Gopher keep on hand for just such emergencies. We settled on an oldie but goofy, Tom Wham’s Snit Smashing. This was Dane’s first encounter with a Tom Wham game and I almost used that Obi-Wan line about taking a first step into a larger world, but then I realized that would make me the grey-haired space hermit. I like Dane but I’m not taking a lightsaber to the face at the end of act 2 just because Joseph Campbell said so.

While I’m a fan of Mr. Wham’s work, particularly Mertwig’s Maze and King of the Tabletop, I had never played Snit Smashing before, so Dane and I started out on a level playing field. That was a mistake. We should have flipped the map over and played Snit’s Revenge so that I would an edge on Dane. But instead Dane had to witness a brief glimpse of my deep, dark secret: man, do I suck at boardgames. I lost, but I had fun doing so.

After the game we chitchatted for a while. Apropos of nothing, Dane asked me about my line of work. When I told him that I worked in debt collections, mostly mortgages these days, he inquired about any insight I might offer into the present financial situation. I have lots of opinions. Whether any of them qualify as 'insights' is questionable.