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Chapter 1

It was a bright and shiny afternoon. The damnable sun streaming through my living room windows woke me. Bleary eyed, I stumbled from the couch to the kitchen, pausing to put on the cheap ray-ban knockoffs that I got last month at the Vince Lombardi rest area on the Jersey Turnpike. $15 and worth every penny.

I knocked back a couple of tablets of Benzedrine, washing them down with pure grapefruit juice -- vitamin c is important -- and sat back and tried to figure out just what the hell happened last night. It was mostly a blur, but as the bennies kicked in, I started to remember more and more.

Chapter 2

It all started when my dealer, a short Peruvian kid named Pablo, showed up at my door unannounced. He held out a strange package.

"I have it, señor. I have finally obtained for you something special, something nobody else could possibly appreciate."

I snatched the box from him. It was bright, covered with random colors as if a clown vomited on it. I squinted at the cover, "Poisson d'Avril? The Fish of April?" I don’t speak French. As I turned over the box and tried to make out the flavor text on the back, Pablo tried to explain.

"No, it is a board game. The most unusual game ever made. It is rare. Fewer than two hundred exist in the whole world. Some would call it... the forbidden game!"

I started Pablo straight in his forehead. "The forbidden board game, eh? What, is it like Monopoly or something?"

Pablo was clearly taken aback by the Monopoly crack, so to sooth his bruised ego, I offered to buy the game for a mere 3 large. He was so excited that he threw in a sheet of acid, the blotter paper covered with pictures of the head of Reiner Knizia.

Chapter 4

My best friend John arrived some time around dinner with unidentifiable Chinese food and his wife, Rebecca. That gave us four players and we sat down for a session of Poisson d'Avril. I cracked open the box which was full of cardboard, wood, and plastic bits. The game had a pair of seven sided dice and a small booklet which I presumed were the rules.

I started looking at the rules while John and Pablo punched out the cardboard tokens. The rules were complete gibberish. It was like trying to read a foreign language. I showed the rules to John who calmly explained they were in German. Luckily, John can read German. He can’t speak a word of it, but after years on something called BSW, John can read German fluently.

I popped a couple of tabs the new acid while John explained the rules. I could almost hear Knizia’s head talking to me as it dissolved on my tongue. Something about auctions and pasted on themes. Or maybe that was the rules of this game. By then it was already too late to tell.

Chapter 5

John, sitting to my left, went first. He played what he assumed was the standard opening move, leaving his wife with three choices. She rolled a 13 and moved her pawn ahead three spaces, banking the rest. The acid was starting to take hold as Pablo made his move. I don’t remember the game having lizards as bits when we were setting it up. Realistic ones too, as they starting crawling around the table, wrecking havoc with my defensive structure. When the three Scandinavian midgets who mysteriously appeared to my right passed me the dice, I knew I had reached the point of no return.

My eyes were open to the blasphemous horrors summoned forth by the game, their eldritch tentacles wrapping slowly around my wrist. I could only gaze aghast as they flapped their iridescent rugose wings and rose slowly from the board and Damn it! I had lapsed into Lovecraft again! Fuck! I hate when that happens.

God, I don’t know what happened next either. I think Rebecca won. I can’t seem to find the copy of the game either. Pablo must have slunk off with it, it and my new widescreen tv. Damn it! Well, I’ll get him next week when we play Sid Meyer’s Pirates, the Boardgame.