Child's Play: "Worm Up!"

So you've replicated....

committed meiosis...

produced a sequel...

knocked out a chip...

pushed out a bambino...

hatched a larvae...

spawned a brat.

Made a new fucking person.  

And now yer thinkin' to yourself: "Oh Sweet Jesus, what have I done?  My sole raison d'être now is to take care of this thing that I've created.  I have absolutely no time for anything else.  All of the hobbies that I loved, that made me unique, kept me sane, made life worth living...they're all gone forever."

To which I say:  Stop thinking in the now, you selfish, narrow-minded, sock-monkey.  

It may be difficult to imagine this as you clean explosive diarrhea off the wall, but one of these days your little shit machine is gonna be a potential gamer.  Play yer cards right and you could have a gamin' buddy for life.  Worst case scenario: you trick them into these nerdly pursuits for a few years until they become self aware, resentful and equate playing board games to child abuse.  Then they steal your Prius and knock over a liquor store.

One of the ways to decrease the chances of future 211 / 503 activity is to ensure that your kid can look back on all of their childhood gameyness with fondness instead of spite.  This means playing games that don't suck.  In other words none of this shite:

Or this:

Or this:

One good way to tell if you've got a decent kids game is to play it without any actual kids in the room.  If you can get half way through it without your brain flat-lining then you've got yerself a keeper.

Such is the case with Worm Up, a secret action selection / racing game in which players control their own multi-segmented wriggler.  After secretly picking one of several movement tokens (numbered 4-7 with one "X" option) participants reveal their choices.  Any player who selected the same number as someone else will lose their turn while anyone who made a unique pick gets to move their patron invertebrate.

This is accomplished by taking one segment at a time from the back of said worm and adding it to the front.  In doing so, you can also be a complete dick and try to cut off an opponent, which I'm apparently doing to Chad in this photo...

The "X" is used to co-opt any number that hasn't been selected by another player.  You also get to swivel the finish line by putting your finger on one of the posts and turning it any way you want.  

The first player to get their worm to touch the finish line is the winner.  Although that sounds even more unintentionally pervy then the Mr. Bucket commercial, I assure you that Worm Up! is good, clean, mindless fun.

Listen now as three grown men have a blast playing a game essentially designed for seven year olds...

    

As I said in the audio, this game is kinda like a low-fi version of the light cycle competition in Tron.  Seriously, even if you don't currently own a mini-me, you still might want to consider getting Worm Up! just to serve as a stupid but fun filler game.  Alternately you can also use it to seriously fuck with people's perception as to what a kid's game is supposed to be like.    

I whole-heartedly give Worm Up! a respectable four pips outta six!