Gotta Catch'em All

Today at 3:03 pm: Attempting to sing songs without using any words from the song's title.

You know what I like most about games? Aside from winning them of course. Games bring people together. In this day and age when there are so many things to suck your time away but every activity seems less communal by nature, it's fun to play games. I can't understand why games aren't enjoyed more (by adults I mean). Perhaps they're tainted by the association that games are for children.

Many people I know insist on throwing money or alchohol into games in order to make them fun. I don't understand why just playing to win isn't stakes enough. Who needs to put money on something in order to take it seriously? I'd play tic-tac-toe and want to cream you just for kicks -- and I'm hardly an ultra-competitive person. I hate it when people add the "...with drinks" to any suggestion of a game. It's so juvenile. Like adding "...in bed" to the end of every fortune cookie. It's not fun, or funny, get over it.

Richard Garfield, game designer and inventor of Magic: The Gathering, said that any game can become ultra-fun as long as you create a ladder for organizational and competitive purposes. I've long believed this and would like to ladder everything in my life if I could. I'd like to create some sort of meta-game you could play over years and years; one with a complicated scoring system and many different ways to win. I guess that could just be life but that's not really exciting enough. Plus, in real life, as opposed to board game Life, it's very possible for everyone involved to end up losing.

Personally, I prefer trivia games or games where a maximum of strategy and tactics is involved. The more people who can play at once the merrier. Now that I'm thinking about it, I know lots of people who love games. I just don't happen to hang out with them. Maybe I need to move.

Favorite Board Games
Squabble
Clue
Trivial Pursuit
Monopoly
Diplomacy

Favorite Group Games
Music Game
Mafia
Catchphrase
Animal Game
Buzzword/phrase