Lesbians On: A Few Hiccups in My Relationship with Board Games

Hey there, we’re two gay board gaming girls from the land of Vegemite. Now I like to think that I’m a bit of a board game Casanova – wooing the best units with my skillz and dashing good looks, playing my cards right to charm those victory points to my side of the board. I mean, I do literally keep all my games inside my (not usually steamy) boudoir. Sadly however, there are times when there are little hiccups in our otherwise beautiful relationship. Ok, it is a shameful admission, but there are a few parts of gaming I fail at harder than a five estate hand in Dominion. Try as I might, there are some things at which I will never improve, even with my very own training montage. Today, I’m writing about those curs’ed things.

1. Hoarding Cards to Make Apocalyptic Hands

There is a wise old saying, urging speedy and decisive action, which goes like this: “Strike while the iron is hot.” Sadly, I seem to have developed my own personal version of this phrase which goes something like “strike while the iron is still tepid.” Draw a killer card first round? I’m not waiting for that so called “optimal strategic moment” to play it as part of a “killer combo.” If I’m holding TNT in my hand I want to scorch my opponent now dammit, not wait to fuse it into an atomic bomb. Apparently, this is not what hard core awesome gamers do. I BRING SHAME ON MY FAMILY. An example. I mentioned on our Twitter (https://twitter.com/lesbigamerz) that my gorgeous gorgeous girlfriend had given me the best surprise an obsessed gamer can get, and planted a brand new copy of RFTG: The Gathering Storm in the middle of my games collection. She also slipped in another game – a cute and quirky card-based quick play called Gloom.

Featuring wonderful art by Keith Baker!

The object of Gloom is to subject the family you play to the most extreme misery possible, and then kill them off for points. Because, you know, board game players are such nice people. For a game of family fun, Gloom can get hilariously vicious, especially when I play with the GF when, as I mentioned before, a friendly match becomes an attempt to crush each other TO THE FIERY DEPTHS OF HELL.

Most of the cards in Gloom are averagely useful, but now and then in a 2 player game you draw a card SO AWESOME that it’s almost embarrassing. These cards have such power that when played it feels like your opponent has picked up your entire game so far and put it through a blender. Thus, when three or four of these cards come out in a row, it’s like a blender, followed by a meat mincer, then an industrial mixer, then back through the meat mincer once again. Which is pretty much what I felt had happened to me after I lost to the GF four games in a row (out of four). The first two games my ego let me chalk it down to luck. After the second two, I could deny it no longer. The GF had a skill I didn’t. The problem was, that while I played a series of unfortunate events, she played the game like a Shakespearian tragedy – everything goes along swimmingly until suddenly everyone ends up dead. No matter how determined I was, I could not hold those great cards until the end. My apocalyptic nuke’em hand of ultimate doom and destruction is never to be…