52 New Things -- Week 4 -- Settlers of Catan

I love games.  I'm not ashamed.

I may be a wee bit too competitive, I'll admit.  For a while there, none of my cousins would play anything at our family gatherings after several Christmas trouncings in a row. And some snickering. Too competitive + a poor sport = no one wanted to play with me. I learned.

Imagine my shock when I fell in love with an non-game loving, non-competitive man.  It's really quite disappointing.  I mean, all those years I was single, I pictured coming home after a long day of work, enjoying dinner with my husband, and then rounding out the evening with a game of Scrabble or Chicken Foot Dominoes.

For real.  That was my vision of wedded bliss -- someone to play games with every night!

Instead I've got twenty games taking up space in our tiny apartment and no one to play them with. So a few months ago when we met a young couple who said they love games, I was super-excited.  Then they started naming some of the games they liked.  Most I had never heard of, but when they mentioned Settlers of Catan, I groaned. They liked those kinds of games.

The games I love are mainly word games like Bananagrams or Scrabble or Taboo. Being a book nerd with a large vocabulary, I can kick butt.  Or party games like Cranium or Catch Phrase that get lots of people laughing and having a great time.  Those are my kind of games.

Then there's that whole other category of games: strategy games. You have to plot and scheme, two things I've never been good at.

In all honesty, I haven't really played many of those games, so I probably shouldn't be so quick to judge. I once played Risk with my brother, though, and afterwards made a mental note to just slam my head in a car door if I ever considered playing again. Those two activities would be equally fun.

But we really like this new couple we met, and to build a friendship, you have to compromise, right? Plus 2013 is all about trying new things . . . and even if the game was as awful as Risk, it would only be a few hours of torture, right?

I brought Beyond Balderdash just in case.

The evening started off well with a delicious dinner and fabulous conversation. After dinner, we sat around their table talking until I rudely cut off one of my husband's monologues on some deep discussion topic by declaring, "We're wasting precious game time!"

We cleared the table and they set up the game.  Kevin had played before, too, so I was the only newbie. (Yeah, the man who refuses to play games with me will gladly go hang out with his college buddies once a year and play games like this. I need to figure out how this peer pressure thing works. Plotting and scheming, plotting and scheming.)

I pretty much accepted from the get-go that I was not going to win. That's a hard concept for a competitive person to accept, but I figured the evening would be incredibly unenjoyable if I got all crazy about not winning. I resolved to not complain too much and smile through the pain.

But you know what? It wasn't really that painful. I mean, after they'd explained things to me, it wasn't nearly as awful as marching armies across continents in Risk. It was even a little bit -- dare I say it? -- fun.

The nicely arranged cards . . . before I started throwing them.

I lost . . . so of course we had to play again.

We started the second game after 10PM, though, so you know it wasn't pretty. I could barely keep my eyes open, let alone pay attention to who had recently acquired bricks or wood or sheep, the important details you need to keep track of to dominate. Geesh.

Of course I didn't win that one, either. Not falling asleep was my only special accomplishment of game two.

So even though I'm pretty sure I'm never going to like Settlers of Catan more than Scrabble or Catch Phrase, you know I'm going to have to play again.  Until I win. At which time I will probably declare it to be a pretty decent game.  :)