Saturday, September 16, 2006

Weekend Gaming

Tal, my 13 yo daughter, likes to play with me, when her friends aren't around. Usually, she likes to play the same simple games that she can play with her friends at school.

For instance, Fri night we played Oh Hell. I suggested that, as we were playing two player, we dispense with the rule about the dealer not being able to bid an amount that would make the total bid equal to the number of the cards for the last two rounds. She said that that was the fun part. We stayed even until round four or so, after which she fell behind and never recovered.

On Saturday morning, however, while waiting for lunch to start, she came to me with Torres. Torres is a lovely abstract game about building towers and moving knights, but usually I would play it with adults. Usually, one player gets the idea of the game very well, and the other struggles to keep up.

In our game, it played out very differently. Tal and I matched moves and strategies throughout the whole game. It's not that we shared the exact same level in each tower, but for every tower that I was on third level and she was on fourth, there was another one with the reverse happening. I let Tal get a slight lead for round 1, and I wasn't able to catch her after that. We scored identically for each of rounds 2 and 3. She won by 6 points. And it was only her 2nd game, and only her first one in about a year.

Later in the afternoon she played cards with her friends, something involving flipping over four cards, collecting sets, and slapping the table. Afterwards, they played The Menorah Game.

Links:

Maksim has tagged me with a meme. I'll get to that shortly.

Craig Perko explains how looking at the rules of a game might make you miss the point.

No one knows what Tanga is yet, but prior to their launch, they are giving away board games to people who participate in a month long series of puzzles on their web site. (Wikipedia says that Tanga is a type of G-string.)

Extras:

The board game Dragon Strike from TSR originally came with a hokey video. See it on Google video.

And Hugh of Gaping Void draws about anti-semitism:

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