Thanks to Anne and her partner, I’m quickly becoming something of a game nut. Last night we all took Ethan down to the local game store, The Game Preserve, and interrupted the Friday night D&D competition because I wanted to buy The Horse Racing Game (best name ever), a mixture of cribbage and Kentucky Derby goodness. They’d recently sold out of that one, so instead I bought the Inns and Cathedrals expansion pack for Carcassonne and a geography card game.
Carcassonne is dangerously good fun, and easy enough to understand for kids as young as Ethan. It’s competitive without being malicious — I hate games that are designed so you have to screw over the other players — and the majority of the scoring happens at the end of the game so you never quite know who will win until the end. Sadly, the game tiles seem to be magnetically attracted to wine, and every damn time we play we end up spilling some kind of beverage on the tiles. The only catch is that you have to have some kind of bag or bucket to draw the tiles out of and not all versions of the game come with a tile bag. Me, I want more city pieces.
After a round of Carcassonne, Anne got out her newest game (the name of which I can’t remember), a card game played like Rummy but with letters instead of numbers. Instead of trying to score by creating runs and matches, you try to lay down your cards by spelling words. Again, this one was easy enough for eight-year-old Ethan to play and still fun for us language nerds. I got to break out my antique dictionaries when I tried to play the non-word “qa.”
Chef and I spent one day rained in on our not-honeymoon playing rummy, arguably one of my favorite days of the vacation. For years worth of weekends, one of my old friends and I brought cards with us to a bar and played rummy, spades, and hearts, while hoards of college students roamed drunkenly around us, dealing in passersby who wanted in on the cards, making up rules as we went along. Games were something of a holiday occasion at my house growing up, wherein my family would break out the small change for a game of Tonk, or battle over who was the smartest person in the house via Scrabble. I still feel pangs of inadequacy when I lose a game of Scrabble, and gloat over my encyclopedic pop culture knowledge base after winning Trivial Pursuit.
Lord help me if I ever get into Dungeons and Dragons. Or Vegas.
Playing D&D is like reading Robert Heinlein. You might or might not enjoy it, but you have to do it so that when the aliens invade, you’ll have the proper mental toolkits available.
You can always spot the D&D player at the movies. S/he’s the one shouting “he’s only pretending to be dead! Finish him off from across the room!” and “Don’t go in there, you idiot! Wait until the group is all together again!”
^ LOL!
Let us never forget Dead Ale Wives’ 8-Bit Reenactment of D&D:
The game I bought last night is “Quiddler”.
Dammit. I wanted to embed it. Why can’t I embed clips in comments?! >.
No idea.
Actually, I think you have to have moderator status to embed in comments.
Also, for other game geeks out here:
If you’re looking for new games to check out, I recommend Board Games with Scott. Scott owns/buys practically every effin’ board game and gives video reviews of them. You get to see the components, game set up, and play. Because of Scott, we continually expand our board game collection.
It is notable that Lauren is actually quite competitive when it comes to gaming. It is also notable that when her significant other bests her at said games, she feels the need to poke him in the ribs. Violently.
D&D has passed me by. They’re on, what, 3rd edition now?
Lord help me if I ever get into Dungeons and Dragons.
But feel free to get into Magic. ;)
Linnaeus,
3.5 now. And they’ve just announced that they’re going to release a 4th edition next year, much to my D&D group’s chagrin.
randomliberal,
Wow. Having only played 1st edition, I feel like a real dinosaur now.
Funny. After we played at Gaby’s, I too, made a trip to The Game Preserve to see about getting the Horse Racing Game for my nieces! No luck, but the guy said they’ll be getting more soon.
I’m supposed to inform (because The Partern’s a partial nerd and knows the difference): we did not interrupt a D&D game, it was a Magic: The Gathering game.