Welfareloser's Blog

a little background first… my best friend nondamnsense has a two-year-old boy, wampus. since he was tiny, he has been both drawn to and terrified by vacuum cleaners. he wants to approach it. he wants to look at it. he wants to open and close the closet door to check on it repeatedly. he wants to tell you all about it. but if you pick him up and carry him too close to it, he stiffens up and starts shaking like a fainting goat. so to help the boy out, i figured i’d combine the innocuous fun of miniature vacuum cleaners and the violent fun of stomping the crap out them with highly trained martial artist killing machines… and so i made him the board game “Ninjas vs. Noonoos: The Most Excellent Battle for Intergalactic Domination.”

for those of you who have not had your brains rotted by the company of toddlers, i should explain that “vacuum cleaner” is a real bitch to pronounce if you’re under the age of 4. the teletubbies, with their infernal cockney babytalk, call their vacuum cleaner “noonoo.” this is really easy to pronounce. i have yet to meet a parent of a toddler who has not given up on their studious shunning of all things teletubby and started calling their own household vacuum cleaner a noonoo. in fact, many parents i know will call any noisy, scary appliance a [modifier]+noonoo, in an attempt to create a mental connection between the appliance in question and the happy, inoffensive plush teletubby appliance, and thus get the kid to quit screaming every time you turn your appliance on. in our house, for example, we have the “coffee-noonoo,” for the coffe bean grinder, “plates and cups noonoo” for the dishwasher, and the “liquor-noonoo” for the blender.

so… here’s the boardgame! i found 8 different dollhouse vacuum cleaners on ebay (see that one with the red head, yellow stick, and blue bag? yeah. highly sought-after collectible, apparently. had it still had the “renewal” sticker on the back of the bag, it would have cost $25-$50. without the sticker, ’twas a mere 99 cents. that’s right, wampus. you now know what you are worth to me.) so, eight ninjas and eight noonoos face off on a hex grid with rules of combat adapted (translation: slightly modified, but basically stolen) from the “Lord of the Rings Risk: Trilogy Edition” boardgame.

now, the two-year-old is likely not going to have the attention span for the actual boardgame; i’m basically giving him some cool noonoo toys and a box to keep them in. but presentation is important, dammit, and i made a nice presentation with this, right down to the asian-print satin bag to store the ninjas in (courtesy of a wedding favor from a taiwanese friend’s wedding) and the yin-yang throwing-star battle marker (courtesy of a recently purchased teenage mutant ninja turtle’s bag o’ weapons.) i even scoured the net for the perfect font to download (it’s called “jappernese.” offensive? maybe. but cool!) it’s going in the mail to denver this morning… and i have been kept off the streets for another weekend.