The Games People Play

What games do you like to play?

This came up because tonight I went to Toni's and played Mahjong. Well, we sat at the table with the tiles and slowly worked through the steps of the game, but it wasn't exactly playing. We showed each other our tiles and asked each other questions about how to play. It's fun, I love the sounds the tiles make when we swish them around, and while it is challenging, it's not like bridge. Bridge makes me feel like I am the stupidest human on the planet. I tried several times to pick it up but finally decided that a game that made you want to cry wasn't all that entertaining.

My favorite board game is Scrabble. I usually don't win because I get excited about putting down funny or clever words and don't pay enough attention to the double/triple word score blocks.

I also like games like Pictionary and Charades, which are both fun and funny. My sister's husband is the best person I've ever known at Charades, and he and Carmen have some kind of psychic connection - they can guess each others' clues when no one else has a clue. The other members of their team will be scratching their heads over the words they have, for example, Carmen signs "book" and has given the first word, "the" and Wilson shouts out "The Communist Manifesto". Those crazy kids.

Yahtzee is another good game that has saved my bacon more than once with my in-laws. It's something that Thomas and I can play with his family. It's called Knifel in German, and we all like to play and no one has to be able to speak the same language to enjoy playing together. Rose, Thomas' mother, gets Knifel/Yahtzee way more than is statistically likely.

I wish we all played more games, any kind of games, whether board games, card games, or word games. It's a great way to spend time with our friends and family, it gets the brain working, and it's way more enriching than watching another episode of Law & Order.