Game Report: Sharon's Day
On Saturday, we celebrated a family tradition we call Sharon's Day. The focus of this year's special day with Sharon was chocolate! As Sharon's Godfather, I'm very pleased that she's developed a taste for chocolate, since I have trouble relating to weirdoes like her father and her brother who are "indifferent to its charms." Anyway, when I heard their home town of Charlottesville was hosting a big Chocolate Festival during Sharon's Day season, I realized it was the perfect thing to plan a day around. And a fun day it was. We capped off the day with a fabulous meal at the Melting Pot -- featuring chocolate fondue of course! And at several points along the way, we played games!

First, during a light lunch at a place called Revolutionary Soup, we played six games of Treehouse. James won 3 of those games and Sharon won once. I lost every time.

Later, at the Melting Pot, we played good old original Fluxx (the version featuring Chocolate). Interestingly enough, this was their first time playing standard Fluxx. They've been playing Family Fluxx since they were 8, when they formed the prime focus group for playtesting with my final prototype (oddly enough on Sharon's Day the year we went to Williamsburg), and of course, just last weekend they got to try Zombie Fluxx, but somehow they'd never tried the original. I was delighted when Sharon squealed "Let's play again!" after winning the first game. "Those are my 3 favorite words in the English language," I replied as I shuffled the deck. We started playing several times but kept having to call the game off due to the arrival of food.

[Writing about this incident has given me an idea. It wouldn't have worked well at the Melting Pot, where everything is served family-style, but the idea is a new House Rule: if you're playing Fluxx at a restaurant, the game ends when the waitron arrives with the food, and the winner is the player who receives their main dish first.]

After dinner and just before bedtime, I finally indulged James in a game of Magic: The Gathering. (For Christmas last year I gave him a set of 5 single-color M:tG decks I'd built for him using my stash of old cards, and he'd been pestering me to play all day.) After he chose the Blue deck to battle with, I took the Green one, and I crushed him with it (but he was Mana starved so it wasn't much of a game).

PS: Having linked to an article about a study of the metabolic differences between people who crave chocolate and those who are indifferent to it, I can't resist quoting Chris Welsh's reaction to it: "So, as you see, you're all robots created by a race of long-extinct fungi. My favorite part was how the fungi were mutant descendents of a bioweopon that had killed the Martians 4 billion years ago, spores of which landed on Earth after a Martian volcano explosion and which are still preserved in Antarctic ice. And how global warming puts civilization at risk from that same weopon in the event of the collapse of the Antarctic Ice Cap. (Basically any day now.) And how the secret robot brains you people have may hold the data we normals need to survive. (Being robots, naturally you're immune.) And the black program to kidnap you and remove your brains for essential, civilization-saving research. (Not to mention improved bioweopons.) When the gov't nabs you and is reading out your secret robot brain, and you're experiencing the indescribable horror of realtime consciousness dismemberment maybe you'll be able, somehow, to generate me an email about it. That'd be some interesting reading I think."

I told him I'd see what I could do.