Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The best moment of my life

Tonight around 10 PM, the greatest moment of my life occurred - this one will be particularly difficult to explain.
  1. We were playing a board game that you have not heard of. It does not have a Wikipedia article. Nor does the company who made it, although we have discovered that it is by the creators of Trivial Pursuit - which renders its obscurity even more puzzling.
  2. To make a long story short, it's a geography game. Basically you read vague descriptions of places from cards and then fruitlessly attempt pinpoint the exact location on the planet at which they are/were located. Some are quite easy: "Ubi wasn't built in a day", but most are basically impossible. One of the game pieces effectively described our reaction to the rules of the game:

  3. The game is wild, wacky stuff. Setting up the game felt akin to making final preparations for a demonic ritual, which you might get a feel for if you take a look at these photos. A few statements in the rules are particularly cryptic, and important to my story:
    "The player born closest to March 15 plays first." (As a side note, this was me.)
    "There's something fishy about some Ubis. We are pulling your leg. These are called red herrings. When a red herring surfaces, the correct answer is 'that's a red herring'."
    "Great Caesar's Ghosts lurks within the game. A player to whom he speaks, beware! (Looking on the bright side, we could have included a dagger)."
  4. "That's funny, March 15! The Ides of March!" we thought. We started to play and learn as we went along, answering a few corrections correctly, and a whole lot more questions incorrectly.
  5. One fateful turn, my team rolled dual Ubi Eyes on the Ubi Cubis which meant that we could choose which accuracy we wanted to give - hexagonal or triangular, which required you to be 6 times more accurate, but is required to actually make progress in the game. We could also choose the region of our choice - AMR (Americas), EUR (Europe), WAT (Water), or UNI (Universal) - a question from each region is found on each card. In other words, we had it made - and we were already two scoring facets ahead of the other team.
  6. We drew the next card from the box and read the clue:
    "AMR: Ubi 'Beware the Ides of March!""Ha! That shouldn't be in the Americas, it should be in Europe!" we thought. "That must be a red herring." We then turned the card over to read the correct answer - and to our dismay, it said something like "Et tu, Bruté?" and told us basically we lost all our points and had to start over.
  7. Let me just clarify the amount of FAIL here for you - I'm assuming you are pretty lost. We had ideal circumstances. We had the privilege to choose and then chose a question which we were 100% convinced we had the correct for. We recognized it as a red herring, which requires us to have read the rules. Which in turn required us to have read the cryptic note about Caesar's ghost. We have read Julius Caesar. We had started the game with the closest birthday to the Ides of March. The question itself told us to beware the ides of march. In summary: Against all odds and all common sense we walked headfirst into our demise.
  8. Andrew immediately began to sing the keyboard cat song - to play us off. If you don't already know what this is, here are some good examples of the keyboard cat phenomenon:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io63z-aRMbg
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLSoYihTtro
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deYn_efItS0
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WSg7dcKFzg
    Of course all these videos require that you have previously been exposed to other videos. It's all very meta and if you are oblivious to the internet subculture and don't get it, I'm sorry, but you probably never will, and nothing I could have said would make this funny to you. But those of you out there who truly comprehend (there has to be at least one) will agree with me, that this moment was perfect, in every sense of the word.
It's only downhill from here.

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