Game Weekend

I'm not talking football - although playoffs were fun and Bill Simmons was 0-4. Ouch. I'm talking board games/card games.

Friday - Poker - no limit Texas Hold 'Em. Maybe the greatest game in the world. One of the coolest elements of Hold 'Em is that players of various skill levels can play each other and the game remains interesting. Also, the rules are simple and newcomer can learn very quickly. As a general rule, a great game must have rules a person of average intelligence can learn in one round of playing. There are a few exceptions - namely Bridge - but that is basically the exception that proves the rule.

Saturday - Trivial Pursuit. How the mighty have fallen. Trivial Pursuit used to be a great game. The new versions are too easy. The old versions were obscure and impossible and awesome...the games used to never finish...but it was fun if you got one super obscure question right, it could increase your game cred forever. I still remember playing it at this high school overnight sleepover thing with teachers and students and there was some question - I can't remember the wording - but it implied a book about or by a runaway slave, and I made an educated guess "Confessions of Nat Turner," because it was a book in my parents study and for some reason I just always remember the title. I was right. The teachers were floored and couldn't stop bringing it up in class for the next two weeks. That's why you play trivial pursuit. They dumbed down the new versions without admitting they dumbed it down. Undoubtedly they were responding to the legitimate complaint that the game was too hard. But they threw the baby out with the bathwater if you ask me. Some things ought to be hard.

Sunday - Modern Art. A game of art auctioning. According to the game crowd tonight, better than Settlers. A very bold statement. Modern Art requires a lot of quick math calculated in your head - all simple math - all pricing. But it requires thinking about present vs. future value and leveraging your art portfolio against the total market (other players portfolios). The one flaw in Modern Art, if you ask me, is the difficulty in keeping track of where you stand throughout the game. You get a vague sense, but one can never tell exactly what they need in the last round in order to win. Maybe this is a flaw, or maybe it is designed this way, it does make the endgame different than most.

Taboo. A lower genre of game - designed more towards the masses - either families or big groups. My SAT analogy - taboo is to drinking games as facebook is to internet dating. Make sense? They are all in the same genus and they all bring out the lower sides of ourselves. Like drinking games, the point of taboo is FUN!?! and laugh laugh, har, har, this is SOOOO funny, ha, ha, can you believe, he/she said that??!!!??? Har har. Oh my god. bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. hahahhahahah. That's sums up Taboo for me.