Archive for the 'Games' Category

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.