Monday, May 14, 2007

Delicious victory

Yesterday night, after all our homework was done, Joel and I sat ourselves down with a few of our new games to teach them to ourselves. We love to have people over for games, but there's nothing worse than having someone try to teach you a game, stumble over the rules, check the rule book, renege on a rule that you've been playing by for 20 minutes because they realize they just made it up, and generally violate your interest in playing the game.

Some of our games we've never played. Some of them we haven't played since childhood, when cheating was expected and rules were hazy. And one of them, Ticket to Ride, we'd played over Christmas with Joel's adorable rich cousins, who then promptly sent us our own in the mail, except that it's the German version (set in Germany, not written in German) and obscenely more complicated (shameless plug: Ticket to Ride is the greatest game since jacks. It's like Settlers of Catan, except you know how sometimes when you're playing Settlers, someone builds the wrong road and effectively screws you over really early in the game, and so you spend the rest of the evening alternately sulking, trying to figure out why your ankle is so itchy, and screwing other people over, because you know you can't win? That never happens in Ticket. I mean, it can, but no one knows where you're trying to go, so they can't intentionally sabotage you unless they're really clever or you're really transparent, and even if they snag your quickest route, it's usually not impossible or even difficult to get where you were going anyways. Also, no one knows who wins until you count up at the end, and the game never lasts more than an hour. End shameless plug).

So Joel and I sit down with our Kahlua (which we bought for $10 in Mexico) and milk (which we drink out of crystal glasses because we have them), to play ourselves a few mock-rounds of each game. We never made it to the other games, because I was so excited by the destination cards I'd drawn in our faux-Ticket game, and Joel gets totally caught up in whatever fun thing is most immediately present.

I actually just wrote this entire post so that I could boast about kicking Joel's ass.

Also, to invite you all over for some games. And Kahlua and milk, if you are of age. We'll serve it to you in crystal.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Rachel,
I fell upon your blog through facebook which seems to be slowly killing bloggers but I'm glad to see you're not giving in. Congrats on the wedding by the way! I looked at your pics and I have to say that the one on the beach/moon is definitely blow up material. Not as in destroy but as in making bigger. Right. Anyways, Chris and I are moving to chilliwack at the beginning of July so maybe you and Joel can be one of our married couple friends that like to play games. Chris and I sit at home playing games quite often and you speaking of ticket to ride and kicking joel's butt reminds me of me doing the same to chris so I figure one day we could unite and kick both our husbands butts at the same time. That would be swell. Until then, have fun in the married life. Peace out. Vicky