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After driving Henry to his friend’s house to spend the night and buying a new set of tires, I went over to Chloe’s house yesterday afternoon to play. I took Ingenious along, and a new game that Henry’s uncle sent to us, Bananagrams, and four decks of cards. First we taught Bob to play Ingenious and played a couple times (great game, easy to learn and a nice mixture of luck and strategy) and then we tried out Bananagrams. It was tremendously fun! You have a pile of letter tiles and simply arrange them into a crossword-type grid. When you’ve used all your letters you’re supposed to shout PEEL! (or something… We opted not to shout out the banana-themed cues, and just shouted “END!” when someone came to the end of his letters.) at which point every player takes another letter from the remaining tiles and the game continues. You can rearrange your tiles as often as you want. When there are fewer remaining letters than players, the person who first uses up all his letters is the winner. Simple! And there are no turns, so there’s no waiting around for someone to figure out how to get the “V” on the triple letter score. Having a rich vocabulary is helpful, of course, but being flexible counts almost as much! It might be better to make lots of tiny simple words, and you might have to destroy a nice word so that you can use up some more letters. I can hardly wait to play again.

When Celia was sick of Banangrams, we played 4-way multiple solitaire, which I’m sure I’ve described here before but to reiterate — every player has his own deck, and lays out a hand of Klondike. Player sit facing each other around a common area where the aces are played. Any player can play to any ace. The player who plays the most cards to the aces, or who goes out first, wins. This is our family card game and is played at every family gathering, with up to 6 participants (any more than that and you have to THROW the cards toward the aces :)

Later on, B and C decided to buy a football game (Madden NFL All-Play 09) and brought it over to our house to play on our wii, heheheh. It was great fun to watch them playing. Football bewilders me, but it seemed like a really well-executed game, and it sure sounded just like a real football match! And Bob and I got into a Blood, Sweat, and Tears frenzy, somehow, and started singing snippets of Lucretia MacEvil etc. which probably drove Chloe up the wall :) Oh I know — it was after they stopped playing football and started tinkering with the wii aquarium, and the Eric Satie piece started playing, which made us think of the BS&T version.

Meanwhile I did a fantastic quest chain in Dragonblight, the one that ends with you fighting in the Undercity! Tremendous fun!

Lots of games, lots of fun, hope we can play more today!