I’ve noted that I like to play various games with The Daughter, especially at the point she can play competitively with me. She can play the board game SORRY and Connect Four (VIDEO) straight up, meaning she can beat me as often as I can defeat her.
I had always beaten her in Chinese checkers, and even when I played her recently, she was playing in what I thought was a haphazard way, moving sideways when she could have jumped forward. But then she set up multiple jumps and actually beat me, by a single move.
Didn’t enjoy playing checkers with me, because she didn’t seem to grasp it. Then one day she beat me. No, she CRUSHED me. She still had 10 pieces to my two when I conceded.
I decided to play her in Yatzhee, and she she beat me the first time out. I won the next five games, but then she’s been winning half the time, so it’s worth it for both of us to play.
My goal this coming fall and winter is to do more tabletop gaming with The Daughter, if I can entice her. We used to play all those games (well, most of ’em), but now she’d be more into things like Risk and Settlers of Catan. And now we actually have a TABLE that we can use!
SORRY remains, I think, one of the great board games, and despite the fact that it’s been around forever I wonder if it’s not a bit underrated. It really is well-thought out, and I remember when The Daughter and I used to play it almost daily, the game almost ALWAYS cam down to the wire at the end, even if one of us seemingly jumped out to a HUGE “lead”. (My “strategy” was generally to always advance my token farthest from Home, unless I could get one into the “Safe Zone”. The worst thing was getting stuck with one token a certain number of spaces away from Home at the end, one of those numbers that you can’t advance on a single card, like 3 (since there’s no 3) and 4 (since the 4 card specifies going backward).
The Daughter never really got into Monopoly, thankfully enough. But that game really doesn’t work so well with just two people playing, and nobody ever plays it to victory, either. We have the Star Wars version, of course!
Oh, and Chinese Checkers is an amazing game. I love it.
I’ve long thought that SORRY was about perfect. BTW, TROUBLE is a far inferior knockoff. SORRY has the backwards 4 and the 11 that you can use to switch with someone, and of course the SORRY card. But you CAN move three; what you CANT move is 6 or 9.
I played this game when I was young, until the marbles get disappeared.
I love these posts about The Lydster! Thanks for sharing her with us! Entrepreneur started teaching Peanut how to play checkers. Now she wants to learn chess……maybe in a few years! 🙂