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January 13, 2006

Fun and Games

During my recent visit in Arizona, at each of the homes I hung out at, I played a game. At my parents' house I played Chinese checkers; at my sister's house I played the Turner Classic Movies version of Scene It?; at my brother and sister-in-law's house I played Carcassonne.

Chinese checkers was one of my favorite games when I was little--at least, it was my favorite game to play at my grandmother's house. My grandmother had this really cool set: a round, flat tin about the size of a dinner plate that served as both playing surface and storage for the marbles: you pushed a lever and suddenly six shallow holes appeared, each holding ten very beautiful translucent marbles of a specific color. When I saw that my mother had bought a set I asked her what happened to that set and she said she didn't know, but she bought the new one because she did remember how much we liked the game. I convinced her to play with me a few times, and when she got tired of that, I played myself, trying to figure out the fastest way across the board. It was so much fun that I think I'll have to find a set and someone to play with.

I am not a terribly competitive person, which is one reason I suck at sports: I prefer winning to losing, of course, but winning often doesn't seem worth the work it requires, and as long as my opponent doesn't gloat or play dirty, I can lose without minding much. This attribute comes in handy when I play any kind of trivia game with my sister Lisa, who has one of the best memories I have ever encountered in my life, and generally takes any and all who challenge her. When she was a teenager, her boyfriend (subsequently her husband) took her home to meet his parents, and they ended up playing Trivial Pursuit. She got a question about the name of a man who spent his life tracking down Nazi war criminals, and when she knew the answer--Simon Wiesenthal--her future father-in-law became enraged, convinced she had cheated. He couldn't believe that this perky bleached blonde whose shoes and handbags always matched had the intellectual capacity to even understand what it meant to hunt down war criminals, much less remember the name of someone who did it. I watched the same thing happen with a guy I was dating: we sat down to play Trivial Pursuit with Lisa, and she ended up kicking his ass and mine. He was flummoxed and angry; I couldn't have been more pleased if I'd won myself, since it meant he finally admit to me that Lisa was a lot smarter than she first appeared.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I lost when I played Scene It? with her. Not only did she knew the directors of movies she'd never seen, but she also just got a lot of easy questions: "What country was The Sound of Music set in?" Then there was this one category of question that I got wrong and she got right every time: you'd see someone's high school yearbook photo, and have to figure out who it was. "How can you tell who these people are from these grainy black and white photos?" I asked. "They don't look anything like their publicity shots."

"I guess I can just see the diamond in the rough," she said.

This game comes with a DVD; a lot of the questions involve watching a film clip and then providing some detail about it. There are cards with questions, but they're not so interesting, and after a while, we set the DVD to "party mode," which meant it just cycled through all kinds of clips and all kinds of questions. Then we weren't competing; we were just seeing what we knew about the movies, and that was really addictive; we stayed up far too late doing that.

The game I liked best was Carcassonne. My sister-in-law, Mia, really loves board games, and she and my brother have a bunch. But this one was special. It involves selecting tiles (laid face-down, of course) on which were bits of river and/or road and/or a town and/or a cloister and/or farmland, which you then arranged to form medieval settlements, farms and roadways around a river. I totally dug it, and I totally won, every time we played, either because of 1) beginner's luck or 2) the fact that I was most likely a medieval French peasant in a past life and so understood intuitively the goal of the game.

My all-time favorite game is Celebrities, which requires no special equipment. (If you don't know how to play, let me know--I'll try to post something about it in the future.) I admit I don't own any game equipment except a deck of cards, and I had all the games removed from my computer because otherwise, I would waste time playing them. But all of the games I played over the holidays are worth owning, and I may break down and buy one.

Anyone want to tell me about a game you really like?

Posted by holly at January 13, 2006 9:35 AM