The Lincoln Children’s Zoo houses its menagerie just four blocks or so from our house. It’s a nice little facility focusing on small—mostly cute—animals, and it has some playground equipment, durable sculpture, and a food court. The perfect place, in other words, to take a toddler so they can burn off energy. Yes, like at a refinery. So we went to the zoo, as you might have guessed, between naps. Two naps. Both for two hours. Travel just beats the hell of out a toddler.
And out of her mother. By the time Wendy was in bed, Dana clearly had sleep at the top of her agenda.
“OK,” I said, a little disappointed.
“But we have to play a game,” she said.
“No, no. Not if you’re so beat. I’ll find a way around this.”
“This would be a bad way to start this project, so we have to do something,” she moved blearily to the dining room table, “how about Abracadabra?”
Abracadabra is a little card game from daVinci and Mayfair games. We picked it up in Berkeley while we were on our honeymoon. It was one of the very first games we bought with the intention of developing a game collection. Originally from Italy, the rules translation is a bit rough. But we’ve persevered and managed to play the game many, many times—even with nephews.
The nephews were young, and the game is simple. Each card has a wizard or witch on it (a Gandalf old guy, a Harry Potter with a thyroid condition young guy, and a very young Samantha girl with fairy wings) with three characteristics: aspect (age/gender), school (robe color), and element (the color of the card border). From there, it’s a matching game. In any set of three cards you lay down, the characteristics all have to have some pattern, either all or nothing (all one element, all one school, all with different aspects; or, three different elements, all one school, three different aspects; etc). As you lay down a set, you pick up a corresponding card that gives you certain points (these remain hidden); first person to fifteen wins. It took us about ten minutes. The art is cute, but the game’s not that challenging. Good to have at the end of a long day.
And did I mention that bottle of welcome-home champagne? That sort of slowed us down, too.
It did feel good, though, to start with something so familiar, something that reaches back to a lovely period of our lives. I hope that we’ll be able to hit some very old classics before long. I have my eye on our Mancala board.
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