Today there was a decent snowstorm, so we were all sitting around watching the snow fly and decided to play some games. We started with Ticket to Ride, and Alex trounced us pretty well. He manged to get several overlapping cross-country routes, and it’s hard to lose with those.
Then Zack and Alex insisted on a game of Axis and Allies, which we’ve talked about for a few weeks but never got around to playing. We’d attempted this several years ago– in 2008, to be exact— and it didn’t go so well. But now that the boys are older, I figured we’d see what happened.
I explained the rules and we played a few turns. I was the Axis powers, and Germany was rolling into Russia pretty well. I was threatening to take over the capitol, which of course is pretty serious. Japan had established a beachhead east of China, and the little U.S. base in Sinkiang was about to be destroyed (I’d already taken out the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, of course). All in all, it was looking like I was going to crush them. But then Alex took the British forces in for a surprise invasion of Italy, and Zack’s American research team developed heavy bombers. Ouch. The tables turned.
In the end, we called it quits because the boys were getting bored. It reminded me of the interesting dichotomy of Axis and Allies: it’s a very interesting (and historically accurate) game, but it takes bloody forever to play. In high school I think we regularly spent entire Saturdays playing a single game– five or six hours at a stretch. Yikes.
After dinner, Kyra and I played a couple games of Dominion. It was ugly; the first game saw me with 107 points to her 54, and in the rematch she scored 136 only to be bested with my record-breaking 154. She demanded that we play Mario Kart tomorrow, since that’s the game she can regularly win against me.
Good times on a blustery winter day.