Family

Naturelich received the two copies of the Menorah Game that I sent to him; I hope he enjoys them.

The Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club web site will be at http://www.freewebs.com/jergames until further notice. Please adjust your links accordingly.

My wife's mother, Margaret, is here for a visit. She's a sweetie; the type who is always supportive and happy to do just about anything with anyone in the family just for the together time.

Also visiting is my good friend Shlomo, who visits me whenever he is in Israel and also shows up for game nights. I invited him over for dinner.

To that end I dragged them both into playing/they wanted to play/ the Menorah game. We played four ways: myself, Shlomo, Margaret/Rachel, and Saarya (who was home on his last day of vacation from school).

The game was slow, but intense and enjoyable, as both Shlomo and Margaret learned the ropes. Margaret and Rachel spent a lot of time huddling and trying to decide what to do with the candle they flipped up each turn. It was also an unusual game where a lot of candles got bought out of discard piles, when that is usually a rare occurrence (sometimes not at all during a game). We all got hit with exactly one soldier during the game.

Despite Margaret/Rachel having two wilds and lots of cash near the end of the game, I managed to pull off a victory through a combination of luck and planning; I had also saved enough cash to buy my last candle out of a discard pile, if necessary, but instead I just flipped it up and bought it to win the game.

As a small aside, my office had a little game during its latest work "pow-wow". We played a small combination of trivia followed by pictionary with Hanukkah/work related themes. I should really volunteer my services for the next "pow-wow".

Yehuda