Tabletop Day or The day I learned I can't throw dice

     Today was International Tabletop Day!  For those not familiar Tabletop is a web show on YouTube’s Geek and Sundry channel that is hosted by Wil Wheaton (Star Trek, Stand by Me).   I am a huge Wil Wheaton fan and also a fan of Felicia Day who started Geek and Sundry so I have been watching Tabletop from day one.  On the show Wil Wheaton and his friends play board games.  Wil Wheaton is a fan of getting people together to hang out and play games, actual real hands on games where you have to communicate and interact with live people.  With the close of the first season of Tabletop and the start of the new season beginning next week the Tabletop team decided to declare March 30^th International Tabletop Day; a day where people everywhere were encouraged to get together and play games.  When I found out that the store All Things Fun in Berlin New Jersey planned on hosting a Tabletop Day event I knew I’d be there.

 

Attendance was great

 

and the air was alive with sound of rolling dice and shuffling cards.  I started out the day playing Zombie Dice with some people including a nine year old girl who was awesome and renewed my faith in humanity.

 

She was so much fun and since I had never played Zombie Dice before she was a big help.  I give Zombie Dice two thumbs up or maybe a half falling off sagging flesh thumb seeing as it is about zombies.  The point of the game is to collect brains. The first person to fourteen brains is the winner.  You collect brains by rolling dice and getting brains before you get three shotgun blasts because then you are dead and you lose all of your brains that you earned during your turn. The strategy is to know when to roll um and know when to hold um.  It was fun and very easy.  I won the first round but did horribly in the second round.  After Zombie Dice I played Oz Fluxx with the same group.  My husband and I bought Fluxx after seeing it played on Tabletop.  We have Pirate Fluxx and Monty Python Fluxx so I was already familiar with how to play the game which is good because it is quite hard to explain to people how to play Fluxx.  Fluxx is a card game and I enjoyed playing the Oz version with all its Emerald City goodness. At one point things got crazy, as is the nature of Fluxx, and in the end I lost and then my new friends left to go have lunch so I joined a new group and game.

 

The game was called Dungeon Fighters.  It was a game where everyone has to work together for a common goal.  The goal was to kill monsters.  Each monster took a certain amount of hit points to kill and you found out how many points you got after rolling a die onto a target.  There was some skill involved because you had to roll the die so that it hit the table first and then rolled onto the target.  Today I learned that I have ZERO dice rolling skills.  I’m sure that when my character got so many wound points that I was dead and out of the game the others that I was playing with were relieved because I was no longer dragging down the game.  It was also embarrassing because this little girl rocked the game.

 

  She even understood the game way more than I did. The team did end up vanquishing all of the monsters despite my pitiful skills.  Finally I joined a group playing Evil Baby Orphanage.  It was another card game whose premise was that we were each time nannies (we geeked out over this and talked about the new Dr. Who episode that we were looking forward to watching in the evening) who had to set up time orphanages where we collected evil historical figures in baby form and try to rehabilitate them so they don’t become evil.  The baby cards have points and the goal of the game is to have the winner amount of points, which I forget.  I appeared to be a natural at the game which lead to the rest of the players ganging up on me so that I lost.  I also lost because one of the guys had fantastic strategy and saved some important cards until the end.  I think the game was worth it just because the cards are hilarious.  I especially liked the rubber ducky taser. 

 

Because it was Tabletop Day all of the games in the store were on sale so I went home and brought my husband back so he could help decide what games to purchase.  We got a few as you can see, including Zombie Dice and a different version of Dix-it so we can rotate our cards. 

 

Shortly after arriving I received tickets to fill out and place in various cups with the hopes of winning a prize.  At the end of the night just before Dr. Who I got a call telling me I had won a prize. I was super excited! I never win anything.

 

By the way if you like playing games let us know because now that we have all of these games we will need people to play them with. 

 

Here is Tabletop