Peanut Panic

This is part of an article I pitched to Cracked (which they rejected) about board games. I might put more of it up here eventually.

Peanut Panic is a game about peanuts and the horrific trials they endure on a daily basis. The plight of the peanut is oft ignored, and only in the 1990’s did we finally attain the courage to stand up and say that something should—Nay, must be done.

In the form of a bright, primarily colored board game.

The thrilling narrative involves a group of peanuts attempting to escape from a peanut butter factory and being stopped at nearly every turn by the Big Brother like surveillance of the… Ugh… Nut Patrol.

The Peanuts are separated into teams of two based on the color of their shell. The racial commentary is obvious here, so I won’t waste time expanding upon it. The movement of your peanuts through the factory is dictated by a spinner in the center of the board. You move your peanuts (always moving the one furthest from the goal) to the closest space with of the color you landed on.

But woe be to the peanut whose spinner lands on the “push down” symbol. If this happens, the Nut Patrol car is brought to stuttering, horrific, mechanical life. It putters its way around the track lifting with its two scoops of terror any peanut hapless enough to have landed on an unsafe space. Once its dark ritual is complete, the Nut Patrol car returns to the start of the board, emptying the contents of its dump truck into the start where the peanuts, now devoid of hope begin their doomed journey anew.

Peanut Panic also serves (much like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies) as a handy reminder of the inherently sadistic nature of the human race. Every once in awhile the Nut Patrol care will fall off the tracks, but we, being the disgusting violence craving beings we are will right it every time, returning the stalwart nuts to their perpetual hell.

“I have seen the two-fisted scooper of death”

Being there are very few spaces on the board and being that there are even fewer safe spaces, a game of Peanut Panic can either be very short if the spins are lucky, or alternatively last as long as a typical game of Monopoly if they are not, which, at rough estimation, is eternity.