Gross!

“You were caught picking a booger (and eating it!!!) at the local mall. Go back one space.”

It’s just before Christmas and I’m playing a new-to-me board game, Scabs and Guts, described by its manufacturer thusly:

“. . . a totally new and exciting ‘meducational’ board game
that’s packed with interesting and occasionally disgusting medical facts
about how your body works.”

Now, I’d like to take the position that medical facts about how my body works can’t be disgusting, but I’m too busy picking my avatar. As Ms Lilly Liver, I am immediately drawn into tackling questions in three charmingly illustrated categories:

• Blood and Guts
• Scrapes and Scabs
• Blubber or Buff

I puzzle over true-or-false questions that are, somehow, trickier than they look:

• You can have dandruff in your eyebrows: True or False?
• Your hair grows faster than your fingernails: True or False?
• Half of what your vacuum sucks up is dead skin cells: True or False?

I take my best shot at multiple-guess questions:

• How fast does snot move while exiting the head?
• How many nerve sensors are up your nose? (Hint: Think in the billions.)
• How many miles of blood vessels are in your body? (Hint for Canadians: Don’t forget to convert from the kilometre figure that you usually cite.)
• How many colours does puke come in?

OK, I made up that last one, but I wouldn’t bet against it being represented somewhere in the five-inch stack of question cards. It is, after all, totally consistent with the slogan on the box:

“Learning has never been such yucky fun!”

And as I play I do learn things:

• Thinking about food will make me a better spitter.
• Phlebotomy means sucking blood out with leeches.
• People have used urine as a mouthwash. (Which people?! Yuck!)

But it’s not all cerebral. This is a game that stretches my kinesthetic quotient, too, offering me the opportunity to act out various likely scenarios:

• The way I’d walk after eating 23 cheeseburgers
• How I’d look as a victim of food poisoning
• The face I’d make if I used urine as a mouthwash

Yuck. Yuck! YUCK!

But I can’t afford to get distracted by the grossness. No, I must stay focused enough to evaluate tactics:

• When I get a numerically based multiple-guess question, should I go with the middle number or the completely improbable high number?
• When I land on the “Select a category” space, should I choose the category offering the most points on this card or my best category based on game performance to date? (Hint: Don’t pick Blood and Guts. Ever.).

But even the best tactics can’t counteract the effect of the wild cards.

“You were caught picking a booger (and eating it!!!) at the local mall. Go back one space.”

Eyes crinkling, the Big Guy finishes reading the card for my turn. But his amusement is a candle to the sun of our Edmonton grandson’s hilarity. As I howl in mock outrage (One must, after all, play the game), kiddo almost falls off his chair.

“Now you see why I love this game so much!”

Well, sort of. I can certainly see that this game is part of a genre targeted to a precise demographic. Amazon reports that those who bought Scabs and Guts also bought these games:

• Doctor Dreadful’s Stomach Churner
• Doctor Dreadful’s Alien Slime Drink
• Totally Gross: The Game of Science

Womanfully putting all distractions aside — snot, urine, and pus, oh my — I battle it out tooth and nail to the finish line. A veteran of playing games with the pre-teen crowd, I know better than to give any quarter. I call out answers where I actually, you know, know the answer, and make as informed a guess as I can for the rest.

Yes, I scratch out every space I can get, using whatever advantage I have, and without apology. After all, I never know when I’ll lose a space because I got caught eating a booger at the mall.