Tirade

**Release Date**: Spring 2000

**Source**: Looney Labs

**Designer**: The Blacksburg Warren

**Artist:** Andrew Looney

**New Rules**: Time and Space Dice

**Tournament Legal?** No

**Amount Produced?** ~500

At a small convention in the trackless East, Andrew Looney decided that the Looney Labs mascot, Tirade, should become a Button Man. Actually, he credits Joe Kisenwether with the idea. The Blacksburg Warren is comprised of John “Tucker” Taylor, Jay DeLanoy, Emily Frawley, and Adam Kopczenski. Between the four of them, they managed to create a 4-die character that’s remarkably strong.

**The Time and Space Dice**: Represented above by the “<“, Time and Space are depicted on Tirade inside pyramids. After your starting roll, every time one of your Time and Space Dice rolls an odd number, you get to take another turn. If both dice come up odd at the same time, you only get one extra turn.

Despite missing a die, Tirade is a serious powerhouse, and too strong for tournament play.

Andrew Looney of Looney Labs, the creator of Tirade and publisher of the button gave more detail on Tirade by sending several links to this wiki editor.

"The easiest way for me to answer your questions is to point you to a number of vintage, hard-to-find webpages. As you can see, Tirade is a plush broccoli with arm-like stems which he can smack you in the face with when he’s upset about something. Kristin and Tirade go back longer than she and I do, and when we first started Looney Labs, I started drawing a weird web comic about him, called Iceland. You can still read those stories here:. Tirade also has several fan tributes to him located here:

Then came JohnCon, in February 2000, when I got to hang out with James Ernest. He wanted us to make some sort of Button Man crossover, and we came up with the idea of featuring Tirade. I wrote about that encounter on my then-weekly blog:

'[I]n attendance was James Ernest (who was actually the Guest of Honor) and as usual it was fun hobnobbing with him, talking shop and such. I competed in his Brawl tournament (and was humbled) and he hung out a lot in our gaming space, playing games. Somewhere along the line (who's idea was it?) we got the idea of doing an officially licensed Button Men third-party expansion, of (who else) Tirade, and it was such an obviously great idea that we started working on it the moment we heard it.

Since the Blacksburg Warren actually plays Button Men, they were totally into the idea of a Tirade Button Men button. They got together with James and brainstormed ideas for his stats, playtested him extensively, and sent me the final numbers just when I was starting to work up the art. We'd already been planning to submit a button order to our manufacturer this week (we need to fill an unexpected order we got for 4 dozen of one of our buttons), so we decided to press the Tirade Button Men release directly into production. If all goes well, it will go on sale here in a week or two, along with a dozen other new buttons we've been cooking up this week.'

[A]s for why Tirade is a loner, I think it’s because he is kind of a solitary character. But I think the real reason is that I didn’t really understand at the time that they were always sold in pairs, and James didn’t insist, so it didn’t even seem strange to me.

### Who is Tirade?

Tirade is a friendly broccoli, as long as you don't make him mad by speaking about things like boiling water. If you arouse his anger, he'll smack you with his stems and you'll see why his name is Tirade. We generally don't accept the concept of broccoli as a food item at Wunderland.

Tirade has 50 dollars that he guards carefully. He tried to spend it all on candy and gum once, but he's not a very smart shopper and he got such a pathetically small amount of candy and gum that he got his money back and has been very frugal with it ever since. Actually, he has $70 now. We're not exactly sure where the other $20 came from.

Tirade is also a master of space, time, and dimension, and possesses the power to teleport around to wherever he wants to go (as long as no one is looking at him).

Tirade tends to hang around pesky bears and talking pyramids.

1. ↑ http://beatpeopleup.cheapass.com/button-men-stats/2000-promos/
2. ↑ http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Tirade/index.html
3. ↑ http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Tirade/WhoIsTirade.html
4. ↑ http://www.wunderland.com/LooneyLabs/ButtonBroccoli/Default.html
5. ↑ http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Tirade/index.html
6. ↑ http://archive.wunderland.com/Iceland/Iceland.pumpkin.html
7. ↑ http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/Tirade/TiradesGallery.html