Last Laugh

Intro

You're a writer for a late night TV show. Lately you've had writer's block. Worst in your career. You find your great aunt's old spirit board. You take it to work to the writer's room for a laugh. The topic brought up to brainstorm on is a skit about Food Villians. Your co-writers start thinking about anyone, or anything, from history, books, movies, pop culture, whatever, that's evil and would be funny combined with something food. Your boss asks what do you have to contribute. You pull out the board and say, "I'll let you know." The whole room chuckles. Your fingers move by some unknown force to the letter D. Before you can keep spelling a thought pops into your head and the words "Darth Tater," come out of your mouth. Now everyone wants to try it!

Why

"Last Laugh" was created for the Community Anthology Challenge where designers had to use only two pages of a coil bound book and a small assortment of standard game parts to create a game. It was inspired by a thing on Twitter called Hashtag Games, where a community of comedians, and writers, attempt to amuse each other, and anyone who ventures onto the hashtag of the hour. With your imagination, three disc shapes, four dice, eight cubes, and four meeples you can have fun with a game of Last Laugh also.

How Do You Play?

You could watch the video. The rules are downloadable and are on the first page of the documents on this webpage. But to summarize it all, you just spoof things in popular culture to make your friends laugh. Topics of discussion are provided. Most of all you want the boss of the round to find your joke the funniest, but if they are being an unfair judge you can use a cube, aka Writer's Block, to penalize their final score. The boss can award you either 4 or 2 points a round. Unawarded players always advance 1 point on the score tracker. Don't be scared of the spirit board thing either. It's just a thematic score tracker and a way to indicate which joke you told by marking the first letter. And if you happen to be on the same brainwave as another player and share the same letter, you could score big by rolling high on your dice if your jokes are identical.

The game ends in 60 minutes or when a player hits 99 on the scoreboard. After all the penalties are calculated the player with the highest final score wins.