Do you sometimes feel like one of those cartoon characters with a little Satan sitting on your shoulder, whipping his pointy tail around your ears and telling you to be really bad?
If so, help is at hand.
Now, thanks to a new board game, you can call in the angels. So the next time you’re tempted to do something naughty, something you expect to regret later, try this detour. For a mere $22.95, you can talk to the angels instead.
“The Angels Talk” game purports to let you communicate with the heavenly beings through a message alphabet board and hands-on pointer similar to the more familiar Ouija board.
This New Age board game, with its accompanying paperback book, promises right there on the package to let buyers in on the secret of “How to Find Heaven-on-Earth.” If true, that’s got to be the best deal since the self-polishing halo – and a lot cheaper than a shrink.
” `The Angels Talk’ is easy to use and gives clear, simple answers to any question. Deeper questions draw deeper answers, and continued use increases the ability to communicate with and receive guidance from the angels,” is the conclusion of one writer who reviewed the product for the magazine New Age Retailer.
This was intriguing, since it seemed to offer such an interesting counterpoint to the more widely known Ouija board, which long has been a slumber party staple of teenage girls. Parker Brothers began mass producing the game – still available at toy stores for under $20 – in 1967. But its predecessors have been around far longer.
Ouija is pronounced wee-gee or wee-ja, though the “Oui” and “Ja” words translate as “Yes” in French and in German and thus, technically, should be pronounced wee-yah. The Ouija board allegedly puts its players in touch with a “Mystifying Oracle” so powerful that the Parker Brothers game people have copyrighted that phrase. Some critics, though, believe that the Ouija board has been a pipeline to the devil, to evil incarnate or to fallen angels.
“The Angels Talk” board, by contrast, came out in September and talks only with good angels, its design team says. It is the creation of a Virginia Beach, Va., astrologist and mother, Kay Sturgis, who conceived it after her dying daughter asked for help in talking to the angels some three years ago.
The child, Kelly, subsequently received a liver transplant and, at 15 is doing well, says her mom. Sturgis, with the help of her husband, Larry, and a pair of friends who had written a book about angels — Deborah Taylor and Thomas Keller — put together the game and book which, the advertising says, “gives everyone direct access to angels!” (“The Angels Talk” is from Penguin Studio, available in bookstores.)
Some board users describe a heavenly peace descending on them as they move the clear plastic, heart-shaped pointer across the game board, which is colored in shades of lavender, blue and celestial-light yellow.
This was not, however, the case with the cynics at the Chicago Tribune who tried to suspend their disbelief and shake some answers loose from the angels. The pointer wouldn’t budge.
Paging through the accompanying “Angels Talk” book, the sentence “Attitude is . . . (an) important consideration,” leaped out. And, the book continued, “While we’re on the subject of attitude, here is another suggestion for effortless communication with the angels. Become childlike. Not child-ish — child-like. Remember when you were a child, how free and trusting you were?”
(Not really. Why do you think we went into the newspaper business?)
According to the book, “This simple trust and belief, that virtually anything is possible, will help banish any doubts that might crop up about communicating with angels.”
Try as we might, we were having a devil of a time getting in touch with our inner children for long enough to get the angels to talk to us.
Fortunately, however, as if by divine intervention, two actual children showed up in the office to aid in the Tribune’s consumer study of “The Angels Talk” board and its opposite, the Ouija.
Lucy Bannon, 8, a 2nd-grader at Oak Park’s Washington Irving Elementary School, and Christina Brown, a 7th-grader at Percy Julian Junior High, also in Oak Park, came by for Take Our Daughters to Work Day and were promptly put to work to answer the question that has confounded theologians and other lesser mortals since the Garden of Eden. Namely: devil or angel?
Amidst many screeches of amazement and delight, the girls found both boards chattering up a storm and giving very different answers to the same questions, both deep and shallow.
“Is God a man or a woman?” they asked. “W” (for woman, one presumes) was the instant reply from the angels. “M” countered Ouija, just as definitively.
“Is there such a thing as ghosts?” they asked the angels, who pointed to “Yes.” Ouija, quite the contrarian, countered, “No.”
On other issues the girls needed some interpretive help. When they asked the board’s spirits to describe heaven, the angels refused, pointing to the word, “No.” But when asked to describe hell, the angels came back with the letters “WX,” which veteran Tribune reporters quickly identified as cherubic shorthand for “Washington, D.C.”
The children who operated both boards seemed to enjoy their assignment immensely, concluding that any profession that actually required you to play games couldn’t be all bad. And certainly a job where you talk to devils and angels was a fun way to spend an afternoon.
We tried to tell them that in the news business you’re likely to spend more time communing with the little red critters with pointy tails than with anyone wearing a halo. And on those rare occasions that we make mistakes, we just say that the devils made us do it.
