Insofar as board games go, Seattle couldn't be much simpler. You roll dice and move your piece around a board to a finish line. Each square represents one of 11 trivia categories or two special decks of cards that are decorated with a coffee cup (those cards are positive moves, such as "Sunny day, move ahead 2 spaces") or a raindrop (negative moves, such as "Get a Jaywalking (sic) ticket, go back 2 spaces.") The card to the left is fairly representative of the kinds of questions you get in the game.

I'm not sure who, exactly, this game is intended for. It's got a lot of the cliches about Seattle that tourists love (It rains here all the time! Crazy!) but the questions are way too tough for tourists: Do you know who the first "African American" member of Seattle's City "Counsil" is*? What position did Congressman Brock Adams hold in the Carter administration**? What local mountaineering company was founded by Scott Fisher, who died while summiting Mt. Everest in May 1996***?

And even our lifelong resident was stumped by a bunch of the questions. A game like this has to be a just-right mixture of easy and difficult clues, and Seattle fails at that. But it was a brisk game, at least. We finished in about forty minutes or so, and then we all went through the deck, finding questions that were nearly impossible to answer and amusing typos (the popular TV show filmed in Washington was not "Northwest Exposure," guys). In addition, several of the players claimed to get high off the board's toxic paint smell, so there's that.

If you're a total wonk about Seattle history (and I mean total wonk, not just an "I-read-Skid Road" wonk) and you have a bunch of friends who are also Seattle history wonks, then this will be a pleasant diversion for you. If you're not, you probably won't find it worth your time.

* Sam Smith.

*** Mountain Madness.