Geeking With the Wife – Episode 5: The Name Game

Grapple in the Garden. That’s the name of the map on which Kate and I are playing tonight. The buildings are arranged around the edges, leaving a large diamond of power points in the center. It’s a great map for power attackers because there are four spots where you can cause an opponent to land on three buildings at once and a multitude of places where you can hit two buildings at once. Zor-Maxim is a power attacker. But tonight, Zor-Maxim is not in the house. In his place: Ninja.

That’s what Kate calls him. She has no problem remembering Zor-Maxim, being able to recall the chemical formula for something like 4-hydroxy-a-cinnamic acid (by way of explanation she offers, “It’s a MALDI matrix”), but she prefers to call him Ninja. She says it’s like calling that particular acid CHCA. It just fits better.

I want to disagree, but I don’t really have time. I’m being thrown through the air onto a Mt. Terra and an Insurance HQ for 5 points of damage to an alpha form that only has 6 health. I didn’t mean to leave myself open. I did what Armodax does naturally – stomp. But in stomping, I cleared just enough room for Kate to step a couple of times, jump over two buildings (doing her best Superman impression), step, skid to a halt, and throw my armored [insert a certain name for a certain body part here] into my own power base.

The camera work isn't bad - this is just what the coming apocalypse looks like.

* * *

Armodax should be a good name. It reflects his ultra form well, in which he’s Resilient, meaning immune to super damage (super damage does double damage, but the name of the effect is more super this way). But in his alpha form, he’s got low defense and no Resilience. He is not armored, either in the figurative sense or in the sense of the ability Armored, which prevents a monster from taking damage from collisions with buildings.

Anklyodax?!

Some monsters and units in Monsterpocalypse have names that fit them well or even define them. Take the Spitter, a unit for the Lords of Cthul. This little guy looks like a lamprey. If he’d been called a lamprey, we’d have an image of a brawling unit that latches onto its prey. But that’s not what it’s called. Instead, because of the name, we intuitively understand that this is a blasting unit. It’s a really disgusting blasting unit, but it is one.

The G1 Strike Fighter is fast. Defender X provides defensive bonuses to his units. A Power Pod helps you gain power dice. A Crawler is not very fast. Pteradax (and Pteradactices) can fly. Krakenoctus has many arms. A Howitzer Ape is a gorilla carrying an artillery piece.

Then there are names that have flavor, but aren’t really helpful. Cthugrosh. Gorghadra. Maurauder. Without the symbols on the base, we have no idea what they do.

* * *

The game comes to a sudden halt when Stubby decides that my A-dice are edible. He’s coy at first, licking a Monkey Talker (that’s what Kate calls the Command Ape). Then there’s a flick of his head, his ears flap flap flap flap, and my dice go flying. I find nine of them but can’t see the tenth. Then I hear a vague clicking noise coming from Stubby’s mouth. Yep, he’s found it. Give, Stubby, give.

I mean it. Give.

We return to the kicking of my butt. It’s my unit turn, and I advance a Bellower (well-named), an elite Bellower, and a Green Fury Van (better called the Mystery Machine) to the center of the map and take aim at a line of Kate’s units. One, two, three, four – they fall to a Chain Reaction of shots. She has to spend a unit turn replacing the units in her power base, but she changes up their arrangement and returns the favor. Her Katanas, which also have Chain Reaction, lead the charge and ping my Bellowers and Mystery Machine.

Katanas are well-named. They’re extremely swift and can direct their damage against more than one target in quick succession. Kate calls them Katanas.

* * *

Stubby isn’t just called Stubby. When he’s trying to eat Monsterpocalypse figures, for example, his name is Monster. When he’s galumphing through the snow, I like to call him Bubba or Stubby-Bumpkins. When he won’t stop licking the kitchen floor (just in case we spilled something while making dinner), he’s Dude. As in, Dude, just stop.

Stubby got his name on the car ride home just after we’d adopted him from the Bell County SPCA in Texas. His name had been Dagwood, but he didn’t answer to it. Since his front legs were shorter than his back legs (and he hops like somebody put hydraulics in him), we called him Stubby on a lark. He responded to it positively, his eyes lighting up and his ears perking. We like to think he basically chose his own name.

Apple is also LuLu. Don’t ask me where that came from. I think it’s a shortening of Apple-oo. When she’s particularly cute, she’s Pumpkin. When she’s roughhousing, sprinting the length of the house and then leaping at one of us, she’s Apple-Bear. When she’s jealous of attention we’re paying to Stubby, she’s the Green Apple.

Apple had her name when we got her from Woodstock Animal Foundation in Bryan, TX. She’s part chihuahua (and a solid dozen other breeds), and one of the head shapes for chihuahuas is referred to as apple. Even though she’s a 35 pounder (now that she’s at a healthy size, anyway), she was named for that chihuahua part. The mailman can attest to her heritage, as she tries to rip his head off through the window every time he comes by.

There’s a new monster on the way for the Tritons. It’s called Crustaceor. Everybody’s going to call it Lobstoc, though. Except for Mike from Privateer Press, who calls his Fred [calls his Fred links to http://teamcovenant.com/02/08/2010/the-covenant-podcast-monster-quiz-contest-part-4/ ].

* * *

Kate has dice in her monster pool and the chance to power up for 6 power dice. This is bad for me. She misses the roll, but this is a friendly game, and we allow do-overs. This time she makes it. See above re: bad for me. She just brawls me this time, but she positions herself such that I’ll only be able to do a small amount of damage. It’s a smart move, not wasting any resources and preventing me from smashing her for a one-hit form kill. I lose my alpha form, then retaliate with a body slam for two points of damage. At this point we’re standing in the flaming wreckage of what used to be my side of the board. I have to take the fight to her side soon.

I’ve saved up my dice with Armodax and take a second monster turn in a row. This time I pick Ninja up and heave him over the Privateer Press building and onto my last Mt. Terra. That’s three points of damage and Ninja’s alpha form. Better still, Kate is on my side of the board.

No photo due to fast and furious flinging of fantastical foes!

The bad news for me is that ultra Zor-Maxim (Super Ninja!) has an 8 defense, nearly insurmountable for units to hit. It can be done, but it takes everything in your force to do it. The bad news for Kate is that ultra Armodax (nothing to say here – it’s a good name in this form) is immune to her super damaging power attacks. She retreats back into her power base. She’s not happy about this, preferring the “kick butt now” approach to the game. She calls me a few names like “goober” and “meanie.” I’ve heard worse.

* * *

I recently had Insult Day in the Introduction to Composition course I teach. I do this every semester. We’ll just have finished going over broad rhetorical techniques – logos, ethos, pathos – and I want my students to realize they can and should concentrate on the smallest units of rhetoric, individual words.

We write down on sheets of paper the worst insults we know for Males, Females, Whites, Blacks, Latino/as, Asians, and Middle-Easterners, and I put them all up on the board. The point is not shock value, though there are always a combination of nervous titters and genuine disgust. The point is that once you actually look at all these horrible things at once, the patterns become manifestly evident. To insult a woman, you define her in terms of her own sexuality. To insult a man, you take away his masculinity (or define him in terms of being a woman). To insult a Black person, you attack the color of their skin, something that can’t be “escaped” no matter what cultural advances are made. To insult a Latino/a, Asian person, or Middle-Easterner, you suggest that they come from a degenerate culture. To insult a White person, you suggest that they are an aberration from an otherwise healthy culture (e.g. “white trash”). My students figure out the hierarchies without me prompting them. When it comes to insults, Male ranks higher than Female. White ranks higher than Black. It’s built into the language.

* * *

I could backtrack and stutter a “sorry” for that last bit, since I was being all funny about Monsterpocalypse and dogs and then dropped in a serious linguistics lesson. Really, though, it’s a good lesson.

* * *

I forgot to mention that I’d used a Monkey Talker to Command an Airborne Ape across the board, contesting the Imperial State Building. Without control of it, Kate can only power up for 2 at a time. That could just possibly give me a shot.

To finish off her power base, I step forward a few times and line up with it. I’m going to rampage through a Skyscraper and the Crystalline building, over a Katana and a Sun Drone, and do a happy dance on the ruins of a Sun Industries building. I roll the dice. I come up short.

I’m now in the worst possible position. Maybe ever. If Kate can reach me (and she can) and throw enough dice (she has just barely enough to make the odds reasonable), she can throw me onto both the Skyscraper and Crystalline building. That’s 1 point of damage for the throw, 1 each for the collisions with the buildings, 1 for a reaction on the Crystalline called Spire (imagine my broken dino-body being impaled on the Chrysler Building, which is the source for the Crystalline building – some names are trademarked, apparently), and 1 each for the fire hazards that erupt underneath me. That’s a one-shot kill on a 6 health monster.

She makes the roll.

Ow. Ow ow ow ow ow. And ow.

* * *

This has been our quickest game ever. Kate’s definitely getting the hang of the game, and I inadvertently and then unexpectedly left myself open for two major power attacks (that’s not quite fair – she made a great move with that first throw). It was a rush for both of us. Not exactly a rush like flying 55 feet into the air and doing a quadruple twist with two backflips (can you tell we’re watching the Olympics?), but a rush nonetheless. Good strategy, good bashing. And that’s the name of the game.