Sunday, February 24, 2013

Home Alone with TableTop


It was a Friday night. The Husband had an event to go to. The Younger Son had plans. I was home alone. I thought about the possibilities. I decided to go to a local Chinese restaurant. I was going to have veggie fried rice and hot tea. But it was dark and cold -very cold- and damp. I ditched that plan.

I stayed in and had cheese toast, kosher dill spears and apple.

And I had a marathon TableTop-watching fest. I had heard about the web video series before it ever started and had subscribed to the Youtube channel and bookmarked them, but I had just never gotten around to actually watching the videos. That night was the night.

Here's one of the videos:



It takes you through a playing of the award-winning game Ticket to Ride, which I've decided would be nice to have.

You see, game-playing can be complicated at our house. There are some games I'm no longer allowed to play because the rest of the family claims I hold supernatural powers of some sort which enable me to win them always. For example, in Clue and Gin I sometimes win before game play has gone around the board twice. I am one with the game. They say it's downright eerie -cue spooky music. In other games (Monopoly and Scrabble, for example), I tend not to take the rules seriously, which they find just a wee bit annoying. So, we've added new games through the years, but as the kids got older and developed more outside interests we seemed to play less and less. I became more and more out of touch with the gaming world and had no idea what was out there.

Enter TableTop, in which Wil Wheaton and guests demonstrate a fun game on video. They have a blog, so their updates show up nicely without me having to remember to look for them. There's a Seen On Tabletop tumbler and a Geek and Sundry Facebook page.

Now that I've seen all the previous episodes, I'll watch each new one as it comes out. We can pick up a new game every once in a while. I'd love to have some games that are playable for just 2 players in addition to being fun for 4 or 5.

This is a real find for me. Being able to actually watch the game played is priceless.

9 comments:

  1. I remember playing Trivial Pursuit in the 80´s. Every time I got all my pieces of pie, my then-mum-in-law would jump up and down in the couch and scream "give her a sports question!". This was considered my cryptonite. I´d still win, though... ;-D

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    1. my husband is the trivia marvel around here. he jokes he's gotten rid of all kinds of information in order to make room for useless trivia in his brain ;) he remembers more trivia than i ever knew! i'm very average at trivial pursuit. we never got the expansion packs for it, but there are all kinds of specialty additions.

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    2. My sister once attended a party were they had Star Wars TP. One guy was confident he´d win, as he had seen Star Wars three (!) times. Well, at our house, mother took out that film every time she was doing ironing, then fast-forward to where Han Solo came into the action. We knew all the dialogue by heart. I must have seen that film more than fifty times. My sis even remembered the serialnumbers of some of the storm troupers, and totally flattened them all!

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    3. lol, yes, seeing star wars 3 times clearly puts him in an amateur status. we were big star wars fans and brought our kids up with them. they would launch into scenes, getting them word perfect.

      too bad about jar jar binks :( and i never forgave them for the midichlorians. i have high hopes for the new sequels, though.

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    4. You know, I couldn´t even bring myself to see the last one they made. I have it on dvd, recorded off the telly, but I´m just never in the mood. Jar Jar Binks was offensive, we thought. I had to look up midichlorians, I had totally blocked that out of my consciousness. What a bellyflop... But, like you, I have hopes for the next ones. Probably because I loved "The Empire Strikes back" so intensely.

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    5. i saw the 4th one in the theater when it came out. the kids were sooo excited to see a new star wars movie. i was looking forward to it, too. i spent the time looking at my watch and bemoaning the fate of the star wars franchise. when we got home, we had to explain to the kids who stepin fetchit was. a sad day.

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    6. I never heard of Stepin Fetchit, very interesting. We still got the connection, that type is so wide spread, unfortunately.

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  2. Table Top is fun to watch. We found one of our new favorite games after seeing it played and reviewed there. Say Anything! is really fun for all ages...well as long as they can read and write. :)

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    1. i'm excited about the upcoming table top day! i'm going to pick up one of the games i've learned about and play it that day. pandemic, maybe. or ticket to ride.

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