Story Treatment: Bruce Lee vs. The Three Stooges

A couple of days ago Jeff e-mailed me about Bruce Lee Game, restless because he couldn't get the classic out of his head. Hoping to soothe Jeff somewhat, I responded by sharing my concept for the ultimate film:

Bruce Lee vs. The Three Stooges
Many years ago I imagined a movie called Bruce Lee vs. the Three Stooges. In the film, the Stooges have set up their own dojo as a get-rich-quick scheme. They develop a style called Prat Fu (in the screenplay only, the name isn't actually used in dialogue). Due to a misunderstanding, Bruce Lee comes to believe that an assault on his own dojo was orchestrated by the Stooges (it was actually executed by Evil Ninjas in Stooge costumes and carried out in Bruce's absence; it's Bruce's students who suffer the assault and name the fake Stooges as the assailants). Bruce Lee gets into a karate kung fu battle with the Stooges, with predictable results - in fact, the Stooges do more damage to themselves than Bruce does. Realizing the Stooges are too stupid and incompetent to have carried out the attack on his dojo, Bruce apologizes and enlists the Stooges in a plan to draw out the real culprits, using them as bait to lure the perpetrators out into the open. Bruce expects to have to rescue the hapless Stooges from the Evil Ninjas, but to Bruce's amazement the Stooges manage to overcome the Ninjas through completely accidental slapstick, plus a little sly behind-the-scenes help from Bruce - you can imagine the sort of thing I mean. After the fight, Bruce congratulates the bruised, dazed, but victorious Stooges on their prowess (with a knowing wink to the audience).

I like to think that as computers evolve, eventually I'll be able to plunk that paragraph into Make-My-Movie (TM) software and it'll spit out the finished film in a few minutes. 

The Eyes of Bruce Lee Game

On Saturday night Sean and I went to visit Jeff and his son Connor to play a couple of board games. We started off with Dominion, a well-designed card game of kingdom-building, which I won by a single point. The real highlight of the evening for me, though, was Bruce Lee Game!, the chaotic and violent game of martial arts.

I picked up Bruce Lee Game! shortly after Steve Fitzpatrick introduced me to it, way back in high school. I'm glad I bought it back then, because the game commands steep prices on the used market; it's long out of print.

The object of Bruce Lee Game! is to travel the streets of Chinatown, building experience, learning martial arts forms and buying weapons so that you can enter the dreaded Labyrinth and fight your way to confront the evil (?) Grand Master at its centre. Street fights, tournaments and assassination complicate matters, as do injuries.

In all honesty, the combat game mechanic in Bruce Lee Game! should probably be considered broken; every time someone rolls a one on a ten-sided dice in combat, you injure yourself and wind up in the hospital. Considering each player rolls the d10 three times during each fight, that's a lot of hospital trips.

Because it's so easy to wind up in traction, Jeff's early lead in the game evaporated. While he recuperated, Sean and I finished our training and followed him into the Labyrinth. If you're injured in the Labyrinth, of course, you wind up in the hospital and have to start all over again. Each of us fought the Grand Master multiple times, only to face bitter defeat in single combat or the greater humiliation of yet another trip to the hospital.

In the end, Jeff defeated the Grand Master on his eleventh attempt. If our game play Saturday night were somehow transformed into a Kung Fu movie, it would have to take the form of a farce. On the other hand, I giggled all night long...

Everything's Better with Zombies

A couple of posts ago, "anonymous" mentioned that he was developing a variant of the boardgame Settlers of Cataan featuring zombies from, well, Zombies!!!. I think that's a terrific idea, and I hope to play one day soon.

The idea made me wonder if other games could be modified to add shambling zombie action. Certainly the infamous Bruce Lee Game (BruceLeeGame!) would be simple enough to combine with Zombies; just add a few Zombie cards to the deck, add random zombie attacks on your dojos, and you're set. Really, how come no one's made a movie in which Bruce Lee fights off hordes of zombies? (They'd all line up and attack one at a time, of course.)

Zombie Monopoly might be fun. You could add random Zombie cards to Chance and Community Chest..."You have been eaten by a zombie. Do not pass go, do not collect $200 dollars." Zombies could spring up on your holdings, bringing down your property values. "Oh no! Just when I paid off my mortgage!"

I thought about zombie Scrabble, but couldn't come up with anything but bonus points for spelling out certain words, such as "brains," "zombies," "splatterpunk," "boomstick," etc.

Zombie charades would get pretty tedious after a couple of turns:

"Okay, one word..."

(Player tilts his head back, drools, extends one arm, shuffles around in random circles) "Urrrgh...ullllh...mulllghh..."

"Zombie!"

Zombie Axis and Allies might be cool. The game starts as normal, but after two turns, zombies spring up in a randomly chosen territory. They multiply very rapidly, and the focus of the game shifts from a world war between powers to a combined effort for survival, Nazis, Allies and Japanese working together to fight off the horde. Zombie Risk could work the same way.

In the world of computer games, someone should write a Zombie Outbreak mod for Civilization. I would think it would be deceptively simple...just replace roaming barbarians with zombies, but have them multiply faster. And if they win combat with your unit, the unit isn't just destroyed - it's turned into a zombie too!