The three girls stared at the box. "Trans- transfor..." Tess, a small African-American girl with more hair than anyone could manage, tilted her head as she tried to read the label. She shrieked as it caused her large afro to fall into her face. Bess pushed her out of the way.
Bess was far different to Tess, with pale skin, blonde hair and blue eyes. But despite her dumb, innocent child act that she'd perfected to get her way, Bess was very intelligent and had a literacy level that was far above others in her year. She snatched the box. "It says, 'Would You Rather - A Game Of Transformation'," Bess read dutifully. "What does that even mean?"
"It means it's a grown-up game, like the ones the older kids play," supplied Jess, looking up from her book. She was a bookish, second-generation Japanese-American girl, but her parent's stricter rules of study had moulded her into an image of a perfect student. She excelled at maths, played 6th grade piano, and spent most of her time bent over extra work, despite her love of fantasy books and drawing. Without looking up from her current book, she put her hand up to call over the teacher.
The second grade teacher, Mrs Huang, trotted over with a big smile on her face. "Yes, Jessica, what's up?"
She pointed at the box, her eyes still not leaving the page. "What's that?"
"Oh, this?" She grabbed it from Bess and turned it over, hastily pulling off the '$5' markdown tag. "There was an odd little store closing down nearby. I saw this and thought you guys might like to play it. Go ahead, you still have plenty of free time left."
She placed the box back down in front of the children and walked away. Tess hesitantly opened it.
Inside was a board of plastic squares, each divided into two different colours by a line running diagonally down the centre, surrounding a large red plastic jewel. The game had a start square but didn't have an end one, as the path simply looped around. As Tess shook the box upside down, decks of colourful cards fell out, along with 6 different game pieces. Bess grabbed the instructions.
"Would You Rather, a game for any number of players ages 6 and above. Instructions: Players choose a token and place it on the start. Taking turns, they roll the die and move the number of spaces. Each space has two colours, corresponding to two different colours of cards. The player must select a random card from each of the coloured piles, and choose between them. They keep the card they choose, and the discarded one is placed back into the pile. Each card is worth a certain number of point tokens, the first to 15 point tokens wins.
"The colours of the cards correspond to a certain type of change. Yellow for human/general changes, red for animal changes, orange for miscellaneous changes, blue for mental changes, and purple for customizable changes. Instructions and explanations are located on each individual card. Black cards have non-transformative actions. Have fun!"
Jess nodded. "Seems like a cool game."
"Well then, come and play it!" Tess grinned, tugging at her friend until she marked her page and put the book down. The trio knelt in front of the board.
"I'm going to be the candy cane!" declared Bess. Jess squinted.
"Isn't that just a normal walking cane?" Jess sighed as Bess crossed her arms and pouted. "Um, I'll take the quill, then."
Tess picked up the rules. "Hey doesn't it say something about the game pieces?" But, unfortunately, her dyslexia made it near impossible to puzzle out the long words, and her friends offered her no help whatsoever, too preoccupied with their game pieces. She sighed and grabbed the umbrella. "I guess I'll be this, then."
Bess grinned and grabbed the dice. "Great! I'll go first."