Not wind, nor rain, nor cute girls can keep me from posting…

Two days ago I didn’t have the misfortune of playing Run For Your Life, Candyman! This is only because I had the misfortune of playing it earlier, so by last Friday, I knew better.

For those who haven’t played it, Candyman is a parody of Candyland and is played in essentially the same way. You draw a card from the deck and move to the next marker on the board with that candy piece on it. In Candyman, you play a gingerbread man running through a hostile candy terrain, with areas like Bad Juju and the Lady I. Scream. You have a sheet that tracks the health of each part of your gingerbread body (four limbs, torso, head). When you pass another player on the board, you’re allowed to make an attack on them, flipping a card from the deck and marking off a square from the appropriate body part. There are very few consequences for losing any of your limbs, except that you’re eliminated from the game if your entire body is destroyed.

Sounds like a classic JRTC game, right? Well, there’s a problem. Like Candyland, Candyman features certain cards that move you straight to designated squares on the board—and there are plenty that will take you backwards. Unlike Candyland, there’s also a mechanic that on the “Candy Cage Match” squares, you get to drag another player back to wherever you are and make a bunch of attacks against each other. In practice, everyone does this to whoever’s closest to the finish line. This can make the game last… pretty much forever. And evidently some people are amused enough by the parody that they forget the fun of the parody ends way before the rest of the game does. I got through a fair-length Catan game, starting after the Candyman players started and finishing before they did. The one time I played, I was praying for the sweet release of gingerbread death so I would have a polite excuse to stop playing. (My wish was granted about 75 minutes into the game, by the way.)

What keeps Candyman from being a decent JRTC game is this tendency to take way too long. It’s also too expensive: $30 for nothing more than cheap cardboard and a couple of plastic figure bases. Because it takes zero concentration, I can see it being an OK beer-and-pretzels game, emphasis on the beer, or play it as a drinking game:

• Whenever you get hit by an attack, take a sip.
• Whenever you would get hit by an attack, but the attack misses because you don’t have that limb any more, take two sips.
• When you actually lose each limb, finish the drink.
• When you feel like you don’t want to play any more, drink until going on seems like a reasonable idea.

Finish with two large glasses of water and two ibuprofen tablets before you go to bed.