board games

This weekend we had some friends over for a cook out, and we all decided to play some board games.

There is a good side and a bad side to playing board games with people who know you really well. The advantages come in when you are playing a game that requires tremendous mental rapport with your teammates, such as “Pictionary”, so that what to others might appear to be a drawing of some kind of mutant monster spawned from a tragic chemical spill, to you is clearly the visual representation of the verb phrase, “to harvest crops”.

The disadvantage is that occasionally your friends’ intimate knowledge of you can sometimes be used against you, as happened to me this weekend when we were playing “Taboo”.

One person was trying to get their teammates to say the word “Secrets”.

The clue: “This is something that Jenny is not good with.”
Everyone’s immediate response: “Hm, that could be so many things.”

Or, you could end up learning something about someone else that you just really did not need to know, as also happened during this game.

The beginning of the clue: “What you want to do to people…”
My friend’s immediate response: “STAB THEM!”

That’s just a little too much information for me.

My husband and I are really competitive people. Like, really competetive. Especially over goofy stuff.

For example, he and I were recently playing a board game with 3 other couples, and on more than one occasion we caused the entire game to ground to a screeching halt because we were arguing with each other over whose turn it was to read the question to the other players.

“Wow,” said one woman. “You’d never know by looking at them how competitive they are.”
“It doesn’t really matter who reads the question,” said her husband, in a futile attempt at making peace.
“OH IT MATTERS!” I retorted triumphantly, as my husband finally admitted that, yes, he had read the last question, and that it actually was my turn to read, and handed me the card in grudging resignation.

However, today at the bookstore I saw something that made me feel SO MUCH BETTER about myself and my competitiveness, that I just had to post about it here. It was a book entitled, Eat This Book: A year of gorging and glory on the competitive eating circuit.

There apparently exists in this world a Competitive. Eating. Circuit.

So clearly, I could be A Lot worse.

PS-For another humorous look at competition, check out today’s Story of the Day at StoryPeople.