0
0
I went home on leave a couple of weeks ago, and a few close friends of mine decided to get together for a night of dinner, drinks, and board games. Naturally Scott, the host of this shindig and avowed bachelor with no kids, only had a deck of cards to play with. So off we trudge into the night, credit cards in hand and beer (the dark German kind) on our breath, to find something with which to amuse the group.
Five blocks later, we wandered into the local all-night pharmacy (did I mention we were on foot and it was cold?) and began our raid of the toy aisle. This is where our real problem began. The selection of board games was disappointing to say the least. We decided to skip Chutes and Ladder (too easy) and Monopoly (too easy to cheat) and settled for a pack of UNO cards and the game Operation. On the way to the counter I spotted a version of Jenga that had colored blocks and picked it up, too.
When we got back, the girls decided for us that we wouldn’t play Operation (too loud and too hard after a bottle of wine) or UNO (too much math on the weekend), so out came the multi-colored Jenga. It’s just like the older version of Jenga for the basics (see the review), but the colored blocks mean something in this version. If you move a red block out of the stack, there is a dare you must complete before placing it on top of the stack. The black blocks have a question you must answer truthfully before placing them on top. Plain wooden blocks are for the weak at heart and don’t have anything on them. If the rest of the players think you are trying to get out of the dare, or not tell the truth, they can refuse to let you do anything else until the group is satisfied with your answer. Pull a dare block out that you have moved before, and the group gets to make up a new dare for you.
It’s a good thing we were already a very close-knit group of friends. Some of the dares were things like sitting in each other’s lap, kissing the person next to you, or swapping an article of clothing. The truth questions range from who has the worst haircut (I won hands down) to “tell us about your first kiss,” to giving details about the first time you went skinny-dipping. It was a lot of fun that night, but I doubt that I would have enjoyed myself as much if I had played the game with people I didn’t already know well.
