killer marbles

Family Game Night.  Sounds appealing.  Even quaint.

Board games with our family involve some rules.  I don't mean the rules that come with the game.  We follow those (mostly.)  What I mean is that there are sometimes little things in a game that may or may not be "legal." 

For instance, many people have a "kitty" in Monopoly where you pay Luxury Tax, etc.  Then if you land on Free Parking, you get the money in the kitty.  To my knowledge, this little rule is not part of the official rules that come with the game.  But pretty much everybody I know plays that way.  (If you don't play that way then you must live under a rock.)

Anyway, the Fry family plays this game that's kind of like Sorry only you use a regular deck of cards and marbles that move around a board.  We sometimes refer to it as Killer Marbles.  It's a homemade game, so there are no printed rules.  However, everybody knows how to play Sorry, and it's basically the same thing.  Somehow, we seem to turn it into something else altogether.

Inevitably, there comes a point in the game where there is a "gray area."  Someone will question a player's move.  Usually the questioner just got "killed" by the other player.  The "killer" will then defend their play.  The questioner will then recount the move.  The killer will proclaim his innocence.  Then everyone else at the table will voice their opinions.  At the same time.  Loudly. 

Generally, the loudest person wins the argument and the game moves on.  You'd think we'd have the rules down by now, but they change every game so it's hard to follow sometimes.

Because of the rule thing, almost everyone cheats.  Or everyone thinks that everyone else cheats. You never really know for sure.

Here are the kinds of players we have in our family:

1.  The blatant cheater.  This person will just take their marble and move it home when it's not even their turn.  Sometimes they get caught & sometimes they don't.

2.  The tapping cheater.  This person "taps out" their move.  Like if they play a 5, they tap their marble 5 times on the board like they just moved 5 spaces but really they moved 4, and everyone knows that you can't move forward 4 because a 4 must go backwards.

3.  The sneaky cheater.  This person is usually the quiet one.  No one suspects them of cheating so they can play a 3 and move 2 and nobody will notice.

4.  The old man cheater.  Nobody wants to be disrespectful to their elders, so the old man cheater gets away with it because he knows nobody will call  him out on it.

5.  The winner cheater.  If you win, you cheated.  period.