I Won a Game!

And I hadn't even ever played it before! This is huge and exciting for me, because I have been on a really terrible losing streak recently.

Slept in too late again this morning, but I promise that stops tomorrow (school- aah!). . . at some point this afternoon, as is usual on Sundays (because Anja is here), we pulled out the Games. We started with the infamous Bohnen-Spiel (bean game). . . have I explained this one? It is a card game where you have 59 different kinds of beans, all with different values based on their frequency, and you try to collect them and sell them to make money and then there are 59 different expansion sets and new rules and things. . . we always play with la Isla Bohnita, which means that we add islands and ships to get more beans. . . it makes perfect sense when you play it, but I am not all that great at it, so I totally lost (also OTHER PEOPLE kept taking my beans before I could get enough for a decent payoff). . . after the beans (which is a long game) came some game involving numbers and ox-horns. . . I can't begin to explain this, but it was another card game in which I lost really, really terribly because it was my first time playing (there is no such thing as beginner's luck for me anymore). . . it went fast because it is one of those games when you stop when someone gets a lot of points (the person with the most points loses), and, considering how terrible I was at it, it took like 5 rounds for me to have the requisite points and so we moved on. The next game was awesome. I forget its name, but it was another card game with some strange medievalish theme that involved building a city. . . there was a king and 7 other characters, each with a special task. Everyone picks a character at the start of each round, and then you draw cards that are buildings and try to get enough money to build the buildings and the first one with 8 buildings in their city wins. Also, you can steal other people's money or demolish their buildings or even kill them for a whole round. It is awesome. . . Piff was almost always the Demolisher dude, and he also lost. . . as it happened, I got myself a nice, pretty 7 buildings, and in the final round, Anja was the king, meaning she got to choose her character first, so she picked the character who was automatically protected from demolition (so I couldn't have it), so of course I picked the character who is able to demolish things so no one else could knock down my buildings. My host mom grabbed the character who can kill someone else, and then she just had to figure out which character I was to keep me from winning that round. She had it down to two characters, and I thought all was lost when Anja told her to pick the demolisher, but I got super-lucky and she picked the preacher (immune to demolition). Anja had to sit out and I built my final building and won quite gloriously. It was an awesome game, with or without my winning, and I am adding this to the proof that Germany has a much better variety of games- don't get me wrong, America has some awesome games, but we seem to have so few. I mean, Germany has a game of the year every year, and I am not certain that enough games come out in America every year for the prize to be worth much.

I have still yet to unleash Phase 10 on this family. I am biding my time, because that crazy game takes FOREVER to play.