Christmas family gaming season begins!

We played a card game called "500" tonight. It's a bit like bridge, but simpler -- two sets of partners bid on how many tricks they can take. First pair to 500 points wins.

Final score: children, 630; parents, -180. Whoo! Who knows what will happen next time? Also, who knows what our next game will be!

E. holds that we should develop a cross-game scoring system to tally total Game Points earned over the course of the holiday season. Such a system could potentially scale the points accrued in a game to correspond to the length of time spent in-game. (Rank matters, not in-game points.) That way, the points accrued from winning a game of Risk would be roughly twice those from winning Settlers of Catan and the winning player/coalition in Diplomacy would likely rake in at least twice again as many points. Although many different aspects of a cross-game scoring system are potentially interesting, we have settled on a relatively simple one which encourages both lengthy and social gameplay.

In this metric, tonight's game wins 2 point-hours each for L. and E., 1 point-hour each for M. and D., and 0 point-hours for A. (who was not playing). So participation is slightly rewarded. Winning a game of 6 individual players earns a lot more points than winning a two-player game of the same length.

Current vacation Game Point tally:
D. 1
M. 1
L. 2
E. 2
A. 0
[everyone else] 0