Act Two: The Games Beach People Play...

OK, so once you get past all the “Wow, we’re at the coast and look there, that’s just a BUNCH of ocean right there is what all that is!” you come to “we gotta do SOMETHIN’ in our faboo beach house!” and also we are a people who love games. We love “you sunk my battleship!” games or “Gin!” games but we also love “super-complex-takes-30-minutes-just-to-comprehend-the-rules-but-SO-MUCH-FUN” games. And right now my special games-loving place has a massive thing-crush for this new concept: collaborative games.

These would be games where instead of it being me against you and you against him and us against them, it’s the players against the game. It’s good against evil. It’s humanity versus evil plagues of deathly-bad-pustulishy-boils and fatal hiccups and gas of death. Which are things you’d want to be against, right? And so finally when I and my favorite people all sit down to play something we get to be nice and friendly and collegial while playing the game the way it’s intended to be played! Genius!

Many games were played during our coast trip, as is always the way. But the two big events were both collaborative games of excellence: Pandemic (which is way more fun than you’d normally expect a pandemic to be!) and Shadows Over Camelot, where my Dad got to REALLY EXPLORE his inner King Arthur! Long story short, all of humanity was wiped out by three nasty plagues (sorry about that – our bad.) but the next night we found the Holy Grail, pulled Excalibur from that bitch in the water and just generally reminded the universe that though Might does not make Right, Knights make KICK ASS, BEOTCHES!!! As a bonus, we got to justifiably use phrases like ‘forsooth!” and “what ho!” and “my liege!” and if I’d had a jerken or cod piece to sport that night I totally would have!

Those that weren’t up for battling Black Nights and speedily-reproducing viruses jumped all over the puzzling portion of the weekend. We laid waste to not one but TWO 1000-piece puzzles because THAT IS HOW WE DO, MY PEOPLE! We are puzzling fiends, and I’m about to tell you the secret: (are you ready? Here it comes!) box lids. Lots and lots of box lids. We horde them in my family – not a single Omaha Steaks box or Avery labels box lid ever goes to waste around here, I assure you – but if you have to you go ahead and steal the tops of every other games box you own because what you want is a different box for every section of the puzzle!

You’re going through the pieces looking for those yellow/orange pieces of dirt road and rice crispies but you sure are finding a lot of the pieces from the giant mouse butt, as well as all that fuzzy, green border that looks like that sweater you hate, so you might as well throw those into their own box as you come across them, right? And that way when someone new comes up to help you can say to them “gosh, you could work on the giant mouse butt. It’s in that box right there.” (because you’ve got dibs on green sweater border, of course.) Sure, there’s a certain amount of turf disputes in our puzzling sometimes, but it’s not a game, people! (those are in the living room, with the people wearing the hazmat suits with built-in cod pieces. And also and by the way, HUZZAH!)


…tomorrow: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM…