Idiosyncratic game terminology.

Cafe Society
1

Okay, I need a bit of a cheering up today. (Long story. sigh) So here’s a silly thread about the funny terms you, your friends, and your family use when playing your favorite board games, card games, video games, role-playing games, or what have you.

I have too many to list them all, but here are some.

Trivial Pursuit: They are not pieces of pie, they are wedgies.

Puerto Rico: The Office is always referred to as the Orifice. Always. Because it’s immature and funny.

Carcassonne: Placing a tile to complete a city, then placing a man in that city and then scoring the city all in one turn is weenie-ing. As in, “I weenie for one point.”

Clans: The name of this game is not Clans, it is “Tiny House Battle 3000.”

Through the Desert: The useless dark brown camel you get to hold one of your riders (to remind you what color you are?) is called the cheerleader camel. Taking territory is always refered to as “an avaricious land-grab.”

Metro: The train cars are called loafs.

RPGs:

Going out into the hall to talk in secret with the GM is called “badguy” or “being badguy.” “There’s something I want to do before the party leaves town. I need to badguy.” or “How come Jeff is always being badguy?”

In non-party games, the time you get with the GM is called slice. “No fair, I got hardly any slice today.” “Jeff was hogging slice.”

General:

The plural of “man” is “mans.” “Put all the mans on the starting square.”

A “train game” is 18XX or any other railroad-themed game. Exception: A “twain game” is a railroad-themed game of the Empire Builder family, where you dwaw on the boawd with cwayons.

On games where you keep track on a score track around the edge of the board, if you lap around, you usually lay your marker on its side to indicate that you have lapped, and thus really have x+100 points. This is called being “drunk with your own power.”

The long plastic sticks that come with some Mah Jongg sets to help you straighten the Wall or your hand are called whacking sticks. You are allowed to use the to whack the hand of anyone who reaches for a tile out of turn.

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In Scene It, the instructions say to choose one person to work the remote control, and this person is the “DVD Master.” In my house, that person is the “Ultimate Unassailable DVD Overlord, bow before me!!!”

Trivial Pursuit pie slices are indeed “wedges” or “wedgies,” unless it’s one of the newer themed games (like Star Wars or SNL) with the different pieholders, in which case they’re “Stupid Thingies.” As an added benefit, we have cutthroat TP rules, my personal favorite being that if you knock over your pie and lose any of your pieces, they’re gone, and you have to win them again. People don’t like playing with us, I’m not sure why.

3

You fools! The Trivial Pursuit pieces are called “toasters”!

Not exactly a term, but an idiosyncrasy. When your team in Euchre is in the barn (aka, one point away from winning), you put the two scorecards behind your ears to simulate cow horns.

–Cliffy

4

And I forgot a gaming term we use during any RPG: “approcreate.”

Basically, it is something not listed with your equipment, but something your character could conceivably be carrying. You come up against a lock you need to pick, some female party member can approcreate a bobby pin from her hair. You need something to bind an enemy’s hands … is anyone wearing a scarf? And so on.

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True that Trivial Pursuit pieces are not called “pieces of pie” - they are simply pie, which can be used as a verb (as in, “HA! I pied that one!” or “Damn, I can’t believe you pied for that one” or “Pie me you bastard!”)

One that is specific to our game table is “fredding” - fredding is when you’re playing any word game and you either misspell or mispronounce a word. This comes from a friend whose surname is Fredrickson, and who cannot spell his way out of a wet paper bag. This does not stop him from insisting that he’s pretty good at word games. He once tried to get a triple word score in Scrabble with the word “bussnes” (for “business”).

We also like to play Taboo, which comes with a buzzer. We should not be allowed to play with buzzers, as we abuse the privilege. Mistakenly buzzing someone is called, “Whoopsing.”

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We call that “the quick two”. As in, “I’ll take the quick two.” (How can you score 1 point in Carc? I don’t think it’s possible.)

Must use…

Tichu For some reason, the sparrow/mahjong/1 is called “The Goober” or “The Goob” in my group. As in, “OK, who’s got the goob?”

Settlers Trading commodities X for 1 is called “crunching” (“I’ll crunch 3 wood into a sheep.”)

Groo At some point in the game, we must sing: “Don’t you want Groo, baby…” preferrably while making the Groo card dance.

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In Settlers of Catan our terminology:

Ore: “Orrrrr”. Said in a pirate voice.
Wood, Sheep: Someone always suggests a trade, saying “Hey, I’ve got wood for sheep!”

When you trade in 4 of one of your goods to get another one, or 6 goods to get 2 if you have a 3-for-1 port, for instance, brick, it’s a “Frivolous Use of Brick,” even if it’s the only way you can make it. Then we make jokes like about paving the road with the carcasses of sheep.

Cities and Knights of Catan: For a long time some of us called the Metropolis a Monopoly instead. One of us got annoyed with that and kept correcting us. Now we call it a McDonald’s.

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Carcassonne - Playing a tile which is almost connected to an already-existing city, road, whatever, and putting a guy on it, is called “muscling in”. Doing so in a fashion that is very unlikely to succeed (particularly if it requires two intervening tiles) is called a “Manley Muscle”, after a particularly optimistic Carcassonne player.

Also, the little guys are called “guys” or “dudes”, not the fancy names they’re supposed to have.

Knights and Cities of Cataan - First of all, the five normal resources are called:
Wheat (NOT grain)
Rock (NOT ore)
Clay (occasionally bricks)
Wood
Sheep

And the three trade goods are called:
Cloth
Paper
Money

I’m not sure whether those are the official terms or not. And playing the card which causes your opponent’s city to not produce for a while is called “putting the smack down” on that city.

General - To Munger is to play frustratingly slowly. “Stop mungering!”, we often exclaim. We even wrote a poem about it (a parody of “Stopping by woods on a snowy evening” called “Playing with Phil on a snowy evening”)

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Oh, yeah, and in Settlers, if I have 8 cards in my hand, so I trade you 4 of them now for 3 of them back later, to avoid getting robbed, that’s called “laundering”, like “money laundering”, and is generally frowned upon.

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It’s been a year since I’ve played Carcasonne, but isn’t it true that if you complete a city using only two tiles, you only get one point rather than two, to avoid making the “quick two” too powerful?

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We used to call it “building a corduroy road” when using 5 trees instead of a tree and a brick (Settlers of Cataan & its expansions).

In Nuclear War, we’d find ourselves asking “anyone have change for 20 million people?”

In Civilization (I think), we’d “people-ate” during the population growth phase.

All Empire Builder type railroad games are referred to as “Crayola Rails”.

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Sticking with the Scrabble theme for a minute:

My brother has a friend named Larry Shannon. Larry insists (contrary to the rules clearly stated on the box) that if someone covers a premium square (double/triple letter/word) on one turn, someone who uses said premium square on a subsequent (or much later) turn gets to augment the value of the new word. So anyone who believe, and attempts to play, as Larry does is said to be “Shannonificating” (pronounced shuh-NOE-nuh-fuh-kay-ting). A secondary meaning of this term is “trying to make up for a lack of vocabulary by adding a prefix or suffix to an existing word whenever possible”.

When we played Monopoly, we called the man-on-horseback token the “Tall Texan”.

During my college years, there was a guy named Steve Anderson in my dorm. Steve was always having sex with his girlfriend. I was once kibitzing as some friends played bridge. I noticed that one player had a 6 and adjacent 9 in her hand, so I played off the apparent “69” and said “Look! An Anderson!” I subsequently riffed off the concept with a few more names, but don’t remember any. Of course, it’s a given that several pasteboard enthusiasts have independently noticed themselves holding three sixes and realized they were in possession of “The Hand of the Beast”…

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There were some rules-change between editions of Carcassonne, but I thought they only involved the Farmers. Check your rules booklet, gonzoron. Maybe you have the older rules? Our rules definitely say that a two-tile city is only worth one point.

And we call changing X comodities for another “pounding.” “I’m pounding brick into wheat.” 'Cause then you get to say, “I’m pounding wood into sheep.” Huhh huhhh huhhh. Uhh huhhh huhhh.

I like “corduroy road,” Morgyn! But if you put a little extra work into it, I’m sure you could come up something dirty. :wink:

And I’m with you Max, it’s wheat, not grain. So then you can say, “Wheat me, beat me.” Because it rhymes. And it’s naughty. Also, it’s ore, it’s rock. There was a new guy who kept calling it “ore,” and we were like, “What are you talking about?” And he was all like, “That’s what it is in the rules, man.” And we were like: :rolleyes:

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Along with that, when my friends and I used to be in the barn, we’d “milk the cow” as a form of gloating. You interlock your fingers, place your hands palm out with thumbs pointing down, while your partner reaches over and mimes milking. I have no idea where this came from. There’s only a very loose connection to the barn, but it’s something we did.

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See, Shannonificating, as you call it, is a standard “house rule” here. If I add an S to your C-O-W, I get all the points for all four letters. And to make games go faster, we allow players to make as many words as they possibly can on a turn (instead of just one word, as it says on the box.) Otherwise we could be here all night.

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Heh. It’s funny hearing what other people do when they play games. At least I know I’m not as strange as I think I am…

Trivial Pursuit: I’m firmly in the ‘pie’ camp when talking about pieces for TP. I like pies. Does anyone else find they have to put them in the correct order, though?

We don’t have many boardgames, though when playing Risk, anyone who loses any territories at all (especially if they had a whole continent) is an ‘ownzored bitch’

For video games, Resident Evil is always ‘REvil’ and due to a rather humourous drinking session one night, Silent Hill shall always be known as ‘Soylent Hill’.

Any attempt to pull off a stylish move, in any game (like doing a perfect run, jump, run, jump, jump combo in Tomb Raider, or navigate the blind camera spots in the earlier REvil games without stopping), that fails miserably is met with derisive cries of “It’s nice to see you can maintignity”.

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I do. Depending on what you’d mean by ‘correct order’ They’d go in in this order:
(Imagine it’s the wheel - which is the play piece.)



     1
    5 7
   3   4
    8 6
     2

Colour doesn’t matter, just balancing the wheel.

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In Yuri’s Revenge I refer to Battle Fortresses as Behemoths. In Generals, any vehicle capable of holding lots of troops and allowing them to shoot out the windows is a Behemoth.

In Command and Conquer (in all variations thereof) a unit that has just barely survived a battle is said to have “smokey nuts” (from an Insane Clown Posse song, if you were wondering).

A unit that doesn’t survived can be said to have “cakked it.”

An MLRS is a multilaunch, pronounced similar to Milla Jovovich’s “Multipass” from The Fifth Element.

In GTA3 and Vice City, if I encounter a minivan or SUV whilst on a vigilante mission I will dub it “Soccermom’s Revenge.”

19

Having looked at the game for the first time in over a year, I realised I inserted 2 too many slices here. The wheel actually goes:



    1
   5 4
   3 6
    2
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By ‘order’ I mean the pies have to be in the correct colour order. As in if the board has ‘pink, blue, orange, green, brown, yellow’ then the pies have to be in the same order. All matching, in order you see :smiley: