[The posts for this month are reposts from the site www.honotogroabemo.org, on which a host of hirsute individuals including yours truly would grow beards to raise money for breast cancer research. The site is defunct, but I thought I’d resurrect the game-related posts. This was originally posted on 2011-11-05.]

(Prepared to defend myself from my Day Four avatar)

Enjoy the full whiskerage while you can — I’m in a wedding tomorrow and so while abiding by the rules I will have to trim the neck region to avoid looking too disreputable. In the meantime, I hope my armament will be enough to protect my six cities.

Yesterday’s game was Nuclear War, a card game designed by Doug Malewicki and first published in 1965. The game capitalizes on the fear of nuclear destruction prevalent at the time, with some rather dark humor. Each player represents a country and the goal is to eliminate the other players, either by playing propaganda cards (harder) or launching missiles (easier). However, if a player is eliminated via warheads, they can launch all their missiles, possibly leading to other players being eliminated, and thus to Mutually Assured Destruction.

An alternative could have been the computer game Balance of Power, designed by Chris Crawford. However, the goal there is to avoid nuclear conflict, not create it. If you fail and the world is destroyed, there are no glorious pictures of nuclear explosions. And no evil glee.