Boggles the seahag mind

Keith: "I tell you, I'm no good at this game," after scoring 15 to everyone else's 2 in the first round.

Me: "I want to be ..." gesture quotes with my hands "not good at this game, too."

Last night, Kris was off playing poker with the boys. He does this so rarely that I'm perfectly content to let him go without comment.

However, with him gone, I jumped at the suggestion Megan made to have in impromptu dinner at someone's house, maybe a pie and cookies thrown in there somewhere. I offered Krikitt Downs, but, well, when Katie offered Assguard, I couldn't help but think, "Evening. No dogs. Friends. No dogs. Cute babies. No dogs. Hmmmmmmm.... no dogs," and rescinded my house offer.

I arrived later than most everyone, with lots of cookie making ingredients in hand, but Katie and Megan managed to fix lots and lots of food, including several tasty desserts. No amazing Megan Chocolate Chip Coooooookies, nor any Shirley's Peanut Butter Coooooookies. Though, the lack of those cookies is a small price to pay for delicious food prepared by someone else.

After dinner, Megan pulled out the Boggle set, and survived the buffet of collective groans and whines from every male at the table. Mark and Keith were the loudest, with Keith claiming, "I'm no good at this game," which he repeated at least a dozen times. When Megan put the Boggle set down, I picked it up and asked why aren't we playing, how about a round, how bad could it be. Somehow, the men were appeased, and paper magically ended up under the pencils placed in their hands.

I remember my grandparents having a Boggle set. I thought I knew the basic gist of the game: shake a the box, look at the letters on the dice, make words from adjoining dice, score them at the end. Given my proclivity for finding words in any group of letterings, I figured I'd do fine.

What I wasn't counting on was the scoring rule that any word you have that someone else also has, is eliminated from both of your lists. So, here I was after round one with twenty, twenty-five words, and three whole points. Keith, on the other hand, had less than ten words, and fifteen points. "I'm no good at this game," he tried repeating. I certainly didn't believe him.

At one point, one of the Boggle boards was full of lots of vowels, and I couldn't write the words I was seeing down fast enough. As I commented about this, half the table exploded in "This is the worst board ever!" variations. I managed thirteen points in that round, with the bulk of them coming from SEAHAG. Not in the dictionary, but Mark and Vinny liked the word so much, I received the points.

Later rounds degenerated into "what three letter words can I find, even if they aren't really words." We ended up with mir (a real word refering to a Russian hut), sid, dis, aga (also a real word, refering to a Turkish/Ottaman lord or commander). Mark tried adding a rule where only words with four or more letters were allowed, to stymie the "That's a word! No it's not! Yes it is! What does it mean? Look it up! Tell me what it means, first!" discussions that developed in later rounds.

He was promptly shut down by the cacophany of women exclaiming, "No way! That's a dumb rule!" The undertone was, of course, "Boys are dumb. They're just dumb."

We lasted I think all of five rounds of Boggle, which is about four more than I was expecting. Words I remember include Mark's brilliant EQUALS, and Vinny's GISM, which apparently isn't a word that displays on the Merriam-Webster website. Mark also had that word, so Vinny received no points for it.

After Boggle, we played Carcassone, Hunters and Gatherers. It's the first time I've played one of these Settlers of Cataan, tile building, strategy games. I had half the points as everyone else at the end, with everyone else (Mark, Chookie, Keith and Martha) all being within 4 points of each other. I played my endgame very poorly. They knew to look at the remaining tiles, figure out how many rounds were left, and start finishing up forests and the like. I didn't make the realization, and ended up with unfinished forests and rivers, which were all unscored.

What I wish I had done that evening is take my camera and use it. I often feel like a dork when I take a picture of some small event like dinner with friends. Taking the picture seems intrusive somehow. Yet, not only do the pictures help these posts, they're a small reminder of the fun of the event. The images can evoke other memories, sometimes more than what the words can do.

Like Megan's laughter at my reaction to Keith's "I'm no good at this." It was spectacular, and totally awesome. Now that was a Kodak moment.