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

Why I'm Giving Thanks

I was subjected to in-house "deep tissue massage therapy" last night. I was rendered unconscious and immobile for the following twelve hours. Today we beat our old records at Kings.

Rubik's cube cereal

The winning place, the losing place

Today was an unscrupulously random "civic holiday" in Canada. In our unexpected downtime (waiting for opening hours), we battled each other even as a nearby wasp battled the windowpane.Drama on the go board.

The Great Office War

I can't resist these videos. So obvious, and yet with decent production values. And entertaining. Original site here. I love Nerf.

Lego Escher, various Rubik's

This seemed cut out for fontesefontes. Via boingboing.