Loopin' Louie and Craps.

What two games could possibly be better suited to each other?

This past weekend I hosted an annual Pentathlon I've been running with a group of friends for the past several years. This year's events included (1) Mini-Trebuchet Artillery Range; (2) Sling Shot vs. Moxie cans; (3) a pellet gun shooting spree involving foam-boards cut out in our silhouettes ; (4) Loopin' Louie; and (5) Craps. The entrance fees of $10.00 each were used to bet in craps and the pot was split between the last man standing at the craps game and the overall winner of the event. The evening was then finished off with a pinata--because one is really never to old enjoy beating a pinata to death.

It seems a bit silly to file a session report for Loopin' Louie, but the fact of the matter is that even after firing a trebuchet and running about in the woods in a dangerous manner with slingshots, Loopin' Louie completely stole the show.

There were five contestants (each assigned an acceptably denigrating pentathlete name by one of their fellow pentathletes). A manner of tallying the results was needed so we could score the event as a whole. We played five rounds of Louie, with a different contestant standing out each round so that, by the end, every contestant had played four games. A player was awarded four points for being the last to have chickens, three points for being in second place, two points for being in third place, and, nonsensically enough, one consolation point for being dead last.

Louie is one of those game for which almost instruction is necessary. The apparatus almost speaks for itself. It is, however, wise to mention that players may run interference even after they have lost their last chicken. In fact, if the only players with chickens remaining are on opposite sides of the apparatus, the game will last until the batteries give up without some other players trying to send Louie into a deadly chicken killing tailspin.

Louie is a capricious pilot, but his trajectory can be controlled if you are lucky and deft in equal measure. By the second game most of us were gleefully sending red wide eye death from above raining down upon the other player's coops. Louie is also very addictive. So much so that even after the event was over, we kept playing it for the better part of an hour. Not even the trebuchet had that kind of draw. There's no real accounting for this phenomenon.

As for craps: all I can say is that the reports of shootings at dice games reported on purple pawn are most certainly not exaggerated. I was bankrupt early on in the game, arranged for a loan, paid the loan back and staged a slight comeback before losing all my cash a second time in a daring bet. While most of this game was played in the traditional manner--with a pair of six sided dice--we also played with a d4 and d8 in homage to Gygax's passing earlier this year. The latter form of the game utterly wreaks havoc with the statistics of craps and is not advised even though it's far more aesthetically pleasing.