Tron - the real life game / Assassin

I rarely outlink, but Tron was one of my favorites, and this is just too cool: play Tron ... in real life: http://mnt.is-a-geek.org/tron/.

Anecdote:

I used to work at Inlumen, a financial web-site company, whose main office was in New York. Israel was R&D.

Back in 2000, I was post Cities and Knights of Catan, but pre-anything else Euro, basically. It was getting on towards Hanukkah. My usual game-ordering method is to send games I buy to my in-laws in Queens to bring over when they have the opportunity, but it so happens that the director of Inlumen, Rick, (president, I think, but not CEO) was coming for his first (and last) trip to our offices in Israel.

When people come on business to Israel, they usually have a lot of free space in their luggage. So, to the horror and shock of my boss, I asked Rick if he would be willing to carry over two games which I would ship to the New York office. He said he would be pleased to do it.

I made a few errors in my game selections.

The first game I ordered was Rebound, the game with the little plastic cylinders surrounding ball bearings that you throw down this plastic track with rubber-bands at one end, hoping to get them to bounce almost all of the way back without falling over the edge. For some reason I remembered this as a reasonably small game: say, the size of a Life board folded up. It was about twice that size in the box. (It was also now a really ugly lime green board with lavender and pink pieces. I remember it being a yellow board with blue and red pieces.)

But worse was the other game. I was naive, and remembered only that Avalon Hill was a great company, and therefore everything they print should be a great game. Assassin was on sale for almost nothing, so I bought it. Assassin is really bad, although I later found out that the game had been changed from the original designer's rules, which are online (which are better, but still not great).

That wasn't the problem; the problem was Rick's complaint, for which he mercilessly teased me, that he was being asked to carry a large box with the word 'Assassin' emblazoned on it for his first trip to Israel, through Israeli security at the airport. "Did anyone ask you to carry anything with you in your bags?" "Uh, just this box with the word 'Assassin' on it."

Yehuda