Poor Wendy! We had a rough day with the girl yesterday. Cutting molars is an ugly business. Watching her shove stuff deep into her mouth and start chomping made me think of the chewing antics of bored dogs. If only our mouths opened farther at the sides. Then we could get her a couple of rawhide bones and she’d be set.
To compound her misery, the milk I picked up over the weekend had gone—as the British say—off. We’d try to give her a sippy cup and she’d just gag. Not pretty, and a total mystery on our end until one of the cats turned up their nose at a puddle. A clue, we said, in manner of Poirot. So the kid was being forced to drink nasty milk while her mouth ached and nobody understood what the hell she was saying.
How to take time for ourselves after all of that? Games, of course.
As I predicted, we started last night with one of the oldest games known to humanity: mancala. Or, rather, a particular version of mancala. I have rules for at least two versions, not counting the 3M Oh-Wa-Ree game we have. This bean-and-bowl game has—well, as many variations as you might expect for a game that’s 1400 years old. Or older. But if all you’re using as game pieces are beans and depressions in the earth, then the evidence of your game play may not survive the night.
We read the slight rules that came with the board and started in. It’s a very quick, fluid game, and we both liked it quite a bit. We came within two points of each other in the first two games (James won first, then Dana). In the middle of the third game, my mother called, so that threw the balance off. Weirdly, it fell in my favor.
After those quick plays, we opened up Caesar & Cleopatra, one of the—now discontinued—Kosmos two-player games (it’s an interesting line, one well worth looking into). Dana was a bit put off by the game before we even began. The male character vs. female character was an issue, though we said later that it’s an easy choice for a designer/publisher to go with. You have two players…men and women are an easy binary. I could tell that she was not looking forward to the game when I mentioned that the rule’s default pronoun was feminine (“the first player can place one of her cards…”) and she snapped, “I got it after the second ‘her.’” I didn’t win any love by mentioning that the game seemed like the classic (and deadly boring) card game, War. It’s like War only as far as you play down cards and the highest card(s) win, but Caesar & Cleopatra has five columns of play, you have a hand of cards to choose from, you don’t always know when a column will get scored, and you have a small pile action cards that let you manipulate the game a bit. After she won (yes, it’s true, and quite handily), we talked about the role of luck in the game (moderate, but a card game will always have luck as an issue) and the ways that luck drives you toward tactical gameplay. My attempt at a larger strategy…well, it wasn’t pretty. She also said that she spent more time playing with and exploring the rules while ignoring to some degree what I was up to. And that small observation should be worth another entry, too.
We’ll come back to the game. Dana suggested that she might enjoy it better in a week. Two issues work toward making her open to the replay: she won, and she knitted most of a slice of watermelon for Wendy.
We’ve just started, but we already have more to talk about than just the usual Wendy, cats, list of things that happened at work. A very nice side effect.
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