Gaming Spirit
“Games lubricate the body and the mind.”
–Benjamin Franklin, American statesman and inventor, 1706 – 1790
I’m looking forward to a good, healthy dose of Scrabble when I go home next week. I’ve found that many Italians are not big game players. Luckily I was able to trick Luca into opening his mind to the world of games during our trip to Aosta, where there was no TV. He’s a big fan of the double deck card game “Scala 47”. In this game you basically have to get cards that add up to 47 and you win. Not all that challenging (though for the mathematically disinclined it can occasionally be rather frustrating. Couldn’t they at least have picked an EVEN number?!)
Anyways, I’m sure you can appreciate the fact that during this TV-less week, even Scala 47 got old pretty quick. So I made a mancala game out of stapled together plastic cups and random pebbles and bean pods found around the farm. Mancala: now there’s an exciting game! We used to make them in Girl Scouts with egg cartons and buttons. Hotness, folks, hotness. If you’ve never played, I reccomend you make yourself a mancala game and find a partner lickitysplit.
If you have played mancala, try out one of the alternatives: there are hundreds!
By the end of our trip, Luca was addicted to Mancala, and now it’s he who’s asking me to play. In the meantime, we’ve aumented our game collection to include UNO (which we two refer to as “colors”), Jenga and one stupid puzzle of a cat trying to eat fish (yet to be completed).
As for my homemade mancala game, I gave it to a group of kids who were staying at the same TV-less B&B with us and were bored out of their minds. (I even threw in the pebbles I collected and their sophisticated container: a plastic Tums bottle. They thought it was cool that the rocks smelled fruity.)
My Mom reminded me today that 