Welcome to Pair of Dice Paradise's new segment: Thrift Sift. In this series I'll be sharing some of the games that I never would have found if it weren't for thrift shops and garage sales. Sometimes parts are missing, even the instructions, but sometimes that can make it more fun. They say "one man's trash is another man's treasure", so we'll see if the games I discover this way are diamonds in the rough, or should have been allowed to continue on their way to the dustbin.

Today's find is Napoleon Dynamite: It's Pretty Much My Favorite Animal Game. It captures all the uproarious hilarity from that one scene in the movie where Napoleon Dynamite draws a picture of a lion combined with a tiger, and stretches that hilarity into an entire board game!

This game was published in 2005, a year after the movie came out. It must not have done as well as hoped, because otherwise I would have expected to see some expansions by now. Some possible expansions could have been:

• A race to build a crystal-powered time machine,
• Verbally assaulting a llama,
• An extreme bicycle course with some sweet jumps,
• And, determining which of three glasses of milk have been tainted by bleach, by taste alone. (Milk and bleach not included in this expansion.)

Sadly, this game doesn't get a chance to explore those possibilities, as it focuses on drawing pictures of two combined animals, and getting your teammates to guess what those two animals are.

As with any game obtained on Thrift Sift, my copy may have been incomplete. But typically, the game would come with: game board, deck of animal cards, pad of paper, movers, mover stands, and instructions.

Now let's see how it works. Simply shuffle up the deck of animal cards, find some paper and a pencil, and start drawing. One player simply secretly selects two animal cards, draws a fictitious animal that combines them, and then their teammates try to guess the animals.

In the video I demonstrate with a combination of a cat and octopus. A "Ca-TOC-to-pus"? "Catapus?" "Octo-feline"? Anyway, my drawing may or may not have caused the Universe to implode. Oops.

Anyway, that's pretty much the game. Drawing combinations of animals, and moving towards the finish line for ones your partners are able to guess.

Thanks for reading!