If I ran a museum…

After my sons’ enthusiastic response to National Chocolate Chip Day on Tuesday, I decided to look for s0me more “days” to celebrate. But before I even got started, I opened an email from APTE (a provider of educational resources) and found out that today is International Museum Day.

I started thinking about what museum to visit this weekend. Then I realized that my son has a Boy Scout campout this weekend, so the museums will have to wait for another weekend. But in the meantime, I got thinking about the idea of museums.

The APTE email informed me that “the word museum literally means a seat or shrine to the muses. In Greek mythology the nine muses were brought to life to rid the world of evil and sorrow. Their job was to protect art and knowledge.”

Never bored with this board game

 

Scrabble!

When I first saw the question about a board game I would never get tired of, I had trouble thinking of one. When my son asks to play a game, I usually try to think of one we haven’t played in a while. Most of them are moderately entertaining, but not something I want to play frequently.

I thought of LIFE, Clue, Trouble, and the various other board games in our “gaming room” in the basement (including a few Al and I made up together). I looked at answers other people had given – checkers, chess, Monopoly. (How could someone not get tired of Monopoly?)

Then as I was walking out the door on my way to work I suddenly thought of Scrabble. Oh yes, Scrabble is a board game, isn’t it? I can’t remember the last time I played Scrabble on an actual gameboard instead of a computer screen.

I log on to Facebook at least once a day, usually more, to see if it’s my turn in Scrabble or Words with Friends (similar to Scrabble though not quite as good in my opinion). And sometimes my husband and I play Scrabble (which is also a standalone application) on his computer.

I would probably play it more often if it were loaded on my computer, though I don’t find it as fun to play against the computer as against another person. There’s no one to exclaim to over lousy letter choices or the fact that the built-in dictionary doesn’t allow a perfectly good word, or to suggest good words to (my husband and I regularly offer each other suggestions).

Back when I lived in the Philadelphia area, I had a friend who would occasionally invite me over for dinner and Scrabble (and sometimes to help her with her computer). Those were fun evenings. Playing on a computer is just not the same, though online Scrabble is better than a lot of the other games out there.

Scrabble was the one board game that my mother was willing to play, as I remember. She had no use for activities that were purely for entertainment, but Scrabble was educational. She didn’t care if she won, she just wanted to learn new words.

All in all I prefer to win than to lose, but the main thing I like about Scrabble is the game itself. I love word puzzles of any kind. (I amazed myself by finally managing to finish the acrostic from Saturday’s Wall Street Journal last night, after four days of struggling with it.) And Scrabble is a great word puzzle.

If you like Scrabble and you’re on Facebook, let’s play!

Games: Quelf

I found Quelf on clearance at Walmart and decided it was worth buying based on one thing I read on the box. Among the contents listed (game board, game pieces, cards, etc.) is “1 giant invisible harpoon (it’s invisible for a reason, use it wisely).” I decided that any game maker with that kind of sense of humor was bound to have made a fun game.

My guess was confirmed when we started reading the rules. The objective of the game? “To have fun. Duh!” Unfortunately it is made for at least three players, and my husband is not into board games. So Al and I had to wait for Zach to get home from college. (Having played it now, I don’t recall anything that actually required three players, so Al and I may try playing it by ourselves.)

As a number of reviews at amazon.com indicate, it is similar to Cranium, “but edgier.” I haven’t played the game Cranium, but we have some of the other games made by Cranium, Inc. Al and I both enjoy the wackiness of the games, and the variety of mixing stunts, trivia questions, word puzzles, and more. Quelf takes the wackiness even further.

Games: The Great Museum Caper

About five years ago, when my husband was working at the Salvation Army, one of the youth activities he scheduled was a Game Night. Al was in kindergarten, so he and I spent our time playing games like Chutes and Ladders or Candyland. Zach, who was in middle school, spent the entire time playing Clue: The Great Museum Caper with a friend, and wished he could have played again.

For a long time I kept an eye out for the game at stores and at yard sales, but with no luck. Then this March, when I took part in a Toastmasters speech contest, Al and I found the game as an item in a silent auction to benefit a Toastmasters club held in a nearby prison. (Two members of other clubs participate, but the meetings are led by the inmates, and our division governor tells us that they have excellent speakers, at least as good as any other club in the area. The one difficulty they have is money to pay for dues, as the inmates don’t earn very much at their prison jobs – thus, the silent auction fundraiser.)

I had though Zach might like to play the game with Al while he was home for the summer, but I guess it no longer has the appeal to him that it had back then. This evening I finally agreed to play with Al. (Up to four can play, and according to the review at boardgamegeek.com four is the best number, but it only requires two, unlike the traditional Clue board game.) It took a while to read through and understand the instructions, but once we started playing it wasn’t as complicated as it had seemed.

Games: The Game of Life Adventures

If you’re looking for a fast-paced game, this isn’t it. It doesn’t have to take a long time, but there’s no point in trying to finish as quickly as possible.

While I do enjoy some games that require speed (such as Word Bubbles at lumosity.com), for the most part I prefer to take my time and think things over. I think Al is a lot like me in that way – one of the fastest ways to get him frustrated is to give him a time to complete something. When I see games where speed is crucial (many if not most of them, it seems), I know it’s not a good choice for us.

When we play the Game of Life, either the original board game or the newer Extreme Reality version, Al always wants to add some storytelling to the game. We always have to make up names for the people we marry and our children, and keep each other informed on what our children are like and what they’re doing. We describe vacations, accidents, and other events as the game proceeds.

That made the Game of Life Adventures card game a perfect fit for us, because it encourages storytelling. It’s even in the rules, that you have to tell a story with each card you play. Now, the story can be a single line of explanation, but I like to expand on it more, and Al embellishes even further. I don’t know if we make our life stories as exciting as we can, as Hasbro urges us its product description of the game, but we do exercise our imaginations.

Games: Word Bubbles

Word Bubbles is my new favorite word game. I’m finally starting to tire of Word Spell, since I’ve played it so many times that I hardly ever come across a set of letters I’m not so familiar with that I know without thinking much what five- and six-letter words I can make. (Though I still get tripped up by a few that I haven’t seen as many times, especially if I have to make a word with silent letters, such as WREATH, or two-syllable words with a short first syllable, such as RETAKE.)

I finished my three free Lumosity brain training sessions, and I’m not going to pay for full access. But fortunately, Word Bubbles is free, and so far it seems that I can play it as many times as I want to. (I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve played it already.)

The idea is simple. You are given three letters, to which you must add on more letters to create words. You can add on as many letters as you want to, but it will only give you credit for three words of any given length. I reach the max pretty quickly for words of six, seven, and eight letters, then I have to think harder to come up with some more words that are shorter and longer. There is a time limit, so speed does count.

Depending on the three letters you start with, it may actually be easier to come up with longer words. I can’t think of any four-letter words, for instance, starting with PSY or IMM. But I can come up with lots of long words. Once you think of a word, the easiest way to quickly come up with more words is to add various endings to it – make it plural if it is a noun, change the tense if it is a verb, turn an adjective into an adverb, or add suffixes such as -ness, -less, and -ish.

Some sets of letters certainly are easier than others. SEA offers all sorts of possibilities, while GOO (which I have gotten at least twice already) offers little that I can think of other than GOOD and variations on it (goods, goodly, goodness, etc.). No doubt in time I’ll get tired of this game too, as I find myself doing the same sets of words over and over.

But for now it’s a lot of fun.

Can you train your brain?

I’m not sure how I came across the Lumosity website a few days ago. However it was, I was intrigued by the idea of playing games that would somehow train my brain to help me remember things better or think faster or have better spatial sense. The site claims there is solid science behind their brain-training program, and from the little I read it sounded plausible.

And there was nothing to lose by signing up for a free trial. So far I’ve done two of the three free training sessions, and the games have been fun. Challenging enough to feel as though I might be doing something of benefit for my brain, but not so hard that I can’t feel good about my score. Of course, I’m sure the games are designed for exactly that reaction, so that people will be willing to pay for a subscription to unlock of the website’s features.

Games: Dance on Broadway

I’ve been thinking for a while about getting a Wii dance game, to have some variety of games that give me a chance to get somewhat active even if I don’t want to really tire myself out. But every one of them has some negatives mentioned in reviews, and most of them cost more than I wanted to spend when I wasn’t sure I would really like it. I considered renting one from Family Video, until I found out how much that cost.

I finally picked Dance on Broadway, partly because it only cost $20, and because I’m actually familiar with some of the songs:

“Aquarius” (Hair)

“My Favorite Things” (The Sound of Music)

“Little Shop of Horrors Theme” (Little Shop of Horrors)

“Fame” (Fame)

Al and I tried it out tonight, and found it somewhat challenging to follow the moves, but still enjoyable. (Neither of us is particularly coordinated – we tried Dance Dance Revolution when we bought it for Zach on the PS2, and while he quickly excelled at it, we couldn’t even get through the tutorial.) With each attempt we improved, but I doubt we’ll reach the point that it’s too easy for us anytime soon.

One thing I don’t like is that the perspective doesn’t stay the same throughout a song. I’m trying to follow the motions of one of the dancers (so far we have stuck to easy songs that had all dancers doing the same motions), and then the “camera” zooms out so that the dancer is further away and not at the same angle. But I suppose in time I’ll become familiar with the different moves (there are only so many different kinds of moves, and a little icon near the bottom of the screen shows what move is coming next), and that won’t be a problem.

I can’t say it was much of a workout, but then we did pick only songs with the lowest level of both difficulty and effort required. By the time I feel ready to try “My Favorite Things” I would guess I’ll be getting a little more of a workout. (Instead, I switched to Wii Sports and played four matches of tennis, of which I only managed to win one.)

But who knows? Perhaps in time I’ll actually start to feel just a little bit graceful.

Games: Guinness Book of World Records

One of our stops during our shopping trip Saturday was at GameStop, where I looked for inexpensive Wii games. I haven’t been playing the other Wii games regularly, and thought that if I had more choices it might help. Many of them didn’t look like they’d get me active enough to do much good, but I finally settled on a couple of games.

Guinness Book of World Records: The Video Game could certainly not be described as a workout video, but it at least gets me standing up and moving my hands/arms, which must be at least marginally more healthy than sitting at the computer or reading a book. It’s also funny, with the ridiculous things that you try to get a world record for, and laughing is certainly good for one’s health.

A lot of the real world records recorded by Guinness are pretty silly, and I have never taken much interest in them. I wouldn’t ever try to get a world record for something I could actually do, since I can’t think of anything I could do better than any of the six billion plus people in the world, and I’m not interested in trying to do something more times or for longer than anyone else would be foolish enough to do.

But some of the activities in the game are not only ridiculous, but impossible outside of a video game. And that puts them back in the realm of fun, at least for me. How fast could you eat an airplane? First you have to bash it to pieces (“hit” it with the Wii remote), then eat the pieces (point the remote at the place you want to take a bite). It took me a few tries, but I beat the world record.

Games: SET (the card game)

I don’t find myself playing the daily SET game as often anymore, partly because I am less interested in playing the daily Quiddler game. I don’t know what dictionary they use to determine valid words for Quiddler, but when I see the words used in the previous day’s high score, it usually includes some pretty strange words. The SET game is fun, but I usually finish it in less than two minutes, and there’s no way to reshuffle and play another set of cards.

So I’ve been wanting to buy the SET card game, where I can shuffle and play again as many times as I want to. But SET is only carried at certain stores, and Wal-Mart isn’t one of them. I could have bought it online, but then I would have to pay shipping charges, and the idea of paying $5.50 shipping on a $12.99 item just didn’t sit well with me.