Last year, the Cracked LCD Halloween Special was a crude Lovecraftian imitation wherein I made fun of a couple of my friends and revealed that Eurogames were actually ritual devices to summon The Great Old Ones.
So when I sat down to pen this year’s Halloween Special I started thinking of other classic horror devices that I could rip off and adapt to a board gaming setting. Believe me, it’s a lot harder than you think to take all the sex and violence out of horror stories and make them about playing TICKET TO RIDE. I thought about going the TALES FROM CRYPT route- you know that one where they play baseball and the bases are all human organs? But I didn’t think that would be all that interesting and there’s only so much mileage you can get out of a sentence like “…and then we realized that the El Grande piece was actually...”
So instead of cooking up some half-baked prose trick that falls well short of treat, I thought instead that I would regale Cracked LCD’s readership with a horror-filled tale from my game delivery days, back when Atlanta Game Factory had shut down and I was running my online business. See, there was an incident I left out of THERE WILL BE GAMES that I kind of didn’t want to talk about but I suppose Halloween is as good a time as any to tell the SHOCKING TRUE STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED THAT NIGHT.
I had received an order from a first-time customer via email, someone calling himself derspieler. I didn’t know “derspieler” from my usual circles but it wasn’t uncommon to get an order every now and then from a new customer. His email read as follows:
hi mike
I saw ur store closed- sorry to hear that. My family are all big gamers and were sad that your place closed before we could get into town to see it. We live kinda far away from atlanta and we don’t get into the big city much.
Do u have the following games in stock?
Belgium 1620
Truck Loader
Alabamia
Cubety Cube
IRS Form 1040-X
I heard u deliver, will you bring them to our house? Its kind of rural, let me know if u can.
Der Spieler
Of course, at that time I was still struggling with my addiction to selling games and I figured, “why the hell not?” I responded to the customer and told them that yes, I could get the crappy Eurogames that he requested. I didn’t tell him they were crappy though, that’s bad customer service. In a couple of days, I received the shipment with his order in it and I arranged to take the games to his house.
Of course, I’m not stupid. After delivering a couple of records that I sold online to local buyer who turned out to be a sadomasochist, a Nazi, and a Garfield fan I knew I should do a little background check on “Der Spieler” first. It turned out that he was active on a popular board gaming site, posting obsessively detailed “session reports”, virtually orgasmic “first impressions”, and lists of games featuring torture as a mechanic. Pretty much par for hobby course. I also noticed that “Der Spieler” sure did post an awful lot looking for other gamers in his area, but I figured that he was probably desperate and lonely living in rural Georgia, probably miles away from anyone who knew PUERTO RICO from port wine.
