The Things You Can Find...

Saturday my roommate and I stepped into a cubby-hole store in town that was advertising a big sale. Everything in the store for $2. We figured with a price like that we were sure to find something worth dragging home. We dug through flashlights, dresses, action figures, DVDs I had never heard of, and candles celebrating 2009. I considered the solar-powered lamps and "I love Paris" tapistries. Then we hit the jackpot- a board game that seemed to still have at least the majority of it's pieces. Neither of us had ever heard of it and one of the glaringly absent components was the directions, but we figured we could probably find them online.
My room mate tried to haggle with the store owner (since it was incomplete) but the guy insisted that it was complete, so we payed him the full $2. When we got home we started digging around online and figured out that our game was the condensed 2-player version of a larger game. We found a .pdf of the rules for our game in German and an English version of the rules for the other game on another website. Fortunately my room mate speaks much better German than I do. Between the two sets of directions we figured out that we were indeed missing about 20 cards. Fortunately we also got enough information for me to make replacement cards out of an old cereal box. Then we played the "basic" version of the game. It was okay. I think it would be more fun if we played it again because we would have some clue what we were supposed to be doing. And then there is a more complex version which looks like it could be quite a bit more interesting. We'll try that next time.

We went back to the store Monday to look for the missing pieces. We didn't find any of them but we did find a couple of birthday cards. The owner let us have them for free to make up for the missing game pieces. All in all, I would say it was definitely worth the $2.