Quelf-Made Men: Three friends introduce unique board game for families
In any one roll of the dice, you may be a drunken tightrope walker, writing a poem about a root canal, guessing Marilyn Monroe's bra size or telling a knock-knock joke.
If you're not sure just what you're playing, the name of the game might be Quelf.
"This isn't just a board game," said Jeremy Fifer, 31, who developed the game with two friends while living in Oceanside.
"The best way I can describe the game is 'insanity unleashed,'" said partner Matthew Rivaldi, 31. "It's so much fun. It's kind of an indescribable experience unless you've been there. The whole idea is you'll do things in the game that people will remember for days and days."
Fifer thought of the game about 2 1/2 years ago and found help developing it in childhood friend Robb Earnest, who has worked for MTV, "South Park" and on several feature films. Rivaldi, Earnest's old college roommate, was brought on board to help turn his friends' ideas into a product.
"I'm more of the straight guy," Rivaldi said. "Those two are the funny guys. What I love to do more than anything else is take somebody's idea and make it a reality."
The three friends developed a board game with eight characters who race from the start to finish, advancing with dice rolls and drawing cards that can either move them ahead or back several spaces.
That in itself may not sound so unusual, but the game's quirkiness comes with the many curves and challenges it throws at players. The object, according to the rules, is not to finish first, but "To have fun! Duh!"
"We always get the response, 'We can't believe I saw my dad do this,'" Rivaldi said.
Players choose from characters that include the Dude ("The ultimate guy's guy), Super Ninja Monkey ("Quelf's resident expert in the Tao of The Banana"), Mrs. Pickle Feather ("The voice of reason in the Land of Quelf") and Queen Spatula ("She is large and in charge").
As a player advances, he picks up one of five colored cards that match the color the character landed on. A yellow card, for instance, may ask a player to challenge an opponent to a thumbwrestling match or to perform "We Will Rock You" with hand and thigh slaps. At the end of the song, other players learn that the card also says that anyone who joined in gets to advance one space.
Blue cards are for "Roolz," which affect either all players or just the one who drew the card. The cards may command everybody to tell a joke every time they roll a three ---- the player gets to advance three spaces if the joke gets a laugh ---- or it may direct the person who picked up the card to quack like a duck whenever a card is drawn.
Green cards are "Quizzles," and contain multiple-choice questions that might ask how Spam got its name or how many possible ways there are to make change for a dollar.
Yellow cards are "Stuntz." They may require a player to dress as a mummy with toilet paper, race an opponent to write down 10 words that start with a Q or even to lick the toe of another player.
Red cards, or "Scatter Brainz," involves all players in a challenge. Each player may be asked to name a romantic-comedy movie, for instance, and the challenge continues around the board until one player is stumped.
"Showbiz" cards might ask players to pretend they are being attacked by a swarm of bees while wearing a snorkel and flippers, dance an Irish jig while singing a children's song or deliver a eulogy for their dear departed dog, Scooter.
"It just kind of came to me one day," Fifer said about how he thought of the multi-tiered game. "I started thinking of this weird idea, and I called Robb. At the time he was working on a script, and he said 'Forget the script, let's do this!' We just hammered it out for the next two years, and itís just been the most crazy experience of our life."
But it hasn't been all fun. On top of the challenges of designing the game and writing material for 720 cards, tragedy struck the team twice.
Fifer, a husband and father of two, was diagnosed with melanoma. The cancer had spread to his underarm lymph nodes, which were removed last year.
Also last year, Rivaldi's fiancee, Heidi Bernhardt of Encinitas, died of breast cancer at 37.
"Last year literally was one of those kinds of years where everything was trying to make us stop," Fifer said. "It was just a very trying time for me, because our game is about humor and laughter."
The friends placed a tribute to Bernhardt on the game board. A sign over a temple doorway reads "The Awakened Heart," the name of her hypnotherapy business.
"Heidi offered to us an amazing energy," Rivaldi said. "It's hard to describe her. Just a positive energy. She had a huge part in keeping us all together. Even when we were dealing with her in the hospital, she'd still be gung-ho about the game and living our dreams for us."
The game went on sale in July and can be found at Pair a Dice Games in Vista and online at www.WiggityBang.com.
Rivaldi said he is particularly pleased that Quelf seems to fill a void in the category of family games that also are creative and funny.
"We'd go to the game store and look for something that we think is funny but you would still want to play with kids, and we just couldn't find anything," Rivaldi said. "Our whole target market was getting a family together to play, but it's based on games we played in college."
"Quelf," in fact, was a word Fifer said he and his friends invented in college.
"Whenever something was weird or crazy, we'd say, 'That's quelf!" he said.
Contact staff writer Gary Warth at gwarth@nctimes.com or (760) 740-5410.