G is for Games

I'm not much of a games woman. My family of origin plays/played many games, most significantly Hearts/Trumps and Scrabble, but since I left home, I've really stopped playing most games. (Much to the husband's chagrin, I've never gotten into computer games of any kind, unless you count a small obsession with Tetris in college, which ended after I started having Tetris dreams and seeing pieces falling down people's faces while awake.) Much of my avoidance of games comes from my avoidance of the ugly sides of competition, which seem to come out in the most "friendly" of bouts. So I just usually say no to games!

Unless, of course, we are visiting the husband's family, where games are enjoyed immensely, and we play many games. Which I actually don't mind, because I play them so little everywhere else. It's a refreshing change! The husband's mother (Hi Beth!) also gives us a game for Christmas each year, and, since she is quite the game aficionado, these are usually really fun and often games I never would have heard of otherwise. For instance, Pass the Pigsis lots of fun and a pocket-sized game you can't live without. I brought it to a recent games night our women's group at church had, and it was the hit of the party (after Apples to Apples, which is the only new game on the market I think I might need to buy), at least after all the women got over the fact that we were playing a game that involved rolling pigs. (Getting over this took longer than I had expected, actually, so be forewarned: you have to roll pigs like dice to play this game. I'm just sayin'.)

Ahywho, this year's game from my mother-in-law is called Qwirkle Cubes. If you click on the link, you'll see that it's quite festive, with lots of black cubes imprinted with colorful shapes. The point is to match the shapes by suit or color and get rid of your cubes. It's fun for many ages.

It's also, sadly, incredibly tempting for the two-year-old set. Did I mention there were 90 of these cubes, about the size of dice? Did I mention they were captivatingly colored? Did I mention the two-year-old? I tried not to even open the box when we got home from Christmas and spirit it away for playing at a later date, but Toddler J discovered it recently and, despite my best efforts, finally, this week, managed to open it and then dump all the cubes all over the living room. Three times in one day. By the end of the day, I gave up trying to pick them up after him and just resigned myself to the mess. Eventually, the husband came home and cajoled J into cleaning them up himself and after that, while J was distracted, I gathered up the box and took it straight to one of my more successful hiding places. Qwirkle has to live in hiding for a while, I think!