Last night we hemmed and hawed for a while, trying to decide what game to play next after a round of Royal Turf ("Go, Nougat!"). Finally I decided we should play a game of Bohnanza with the High Bohn expansion, which I rank as the best expansion ever made for any game, ever. All of my Bohnanza products were stacked on a wall shelf. There are a lot of them these days, and they were wedged in pretty tightly. High Bohn wouldn't slip free. I gave it a tug, then braced my hand against the rest of the stack and tugged again.
Bad move.
The entire shelving rack pulled out of the wall, toppling about 150 medium- and small-box games onto me and the floor. I caught a shelf in the face, and stood holding a couple of shelves aloft until guests could rescue me. Amazingly, only a half dozen or so games spilled their contents. My Knightmare Chess and Knightmare Chess 2 sets are now hopelessly intermingled. King of the Elves, a game I abandoned long ago but never bothered to trade away, mocked me by spewing its coins and chits everywhere. Money from Ravensburger's edition of Last Chance scattered. A cheap chess set dumped its pieces all over. Other than that, everything else stayed more or less intact.
So it turned out our next game was a giant round of 52 pick up, as we resorted pieces and stacked games on the table. The shelves had held for over eleven years. The lesson for when we put them back up? Dry-wall screws. And perhaps it's time to get rid of some of the games on these shelves that I never play.
Posted by Peter at June 1, 2005 10:54 AM