All a board.
Darryl mentioned to me, by email,
that he’s been playing board & card games a bunch recently. Here’s
what I told him:
Erin and I are unrepentant fans of Settlers of Catan, having been
introduced to its particular brand of cutthroat play while at Rice. We
haven’t played much recently, but someone had a travel Settlers at the
wedding, which is just all kinds of awesome.
And Erin and I have gotten sucked into the virtual board-game that is
Mario Party 5. Don’t laugh! It’s massively addictive. (I got Erin two
GCN games for Chanukah—one which was a sure bet, and one which was a
real out-there choice. The first was Double Dash!! and the second,
Mario Party 5; I needed MP5 to get the Zelda collector’s disc (which is
awesome). It turns out that we’ve played DD, like, twice, and spent
probably twenty hours in MP5 so far. Scary!)
But the thing we played most over our little mini-break was … Texas
Hold ’Em Poker. Yeah, the one that’s used on Celebrity Poker Showdown,
as well as in the poker finals on ESPN. It’s massively fun, especially
with a big group, and your change jar upended on the card table for
chips (should you fail to have any actual chips, and not mind playing
for tiny stakes). There’s so much strategy because you can see as many
as five of the cards in your opponents’ hands, and with seven total
cards you can often come up with something interesting (rather than
5-card draw, in which the winning hand is often “pair of sixes”).
I’m not hugely into specialty board games; E and I love the standards
(Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble, Monopoly, etc.) but aren’t really into the
Cheapass stuff or Fluxx (though we have been known to play one or two
rounds of that). I guess it’s just a matter of time, though.