It's All Just Games and Fun

Amy and I took a post-Christmas shopping trip to Jonesboro, Arkansas, to spend a little leftover Christmas money (I know, right?!). One of the stores at the mall features calendars, jigsaw puzzles, and party games, and everything on hand was 50 percent off, so I bought three new party games. We love games in the Sanders house, and we also belong to a church group that has game night once a month, so the new additions will come in handy.

My new purchases were a six-in-one Party Charades game, a category matching game called "Tension," which is similar to the eighties game "Outburst," and a crazy party game called "Furt," which would take an entire blog entry to explain. Suffice to say the kids and I test-drove "Furt" Monday night, and it got the seal of approval from everyone.

This led me to think about what my top ten board games of all time list would be. I eliminated some of the more obvious choices like Monopoly (too vicious), Clue (boring), Scrabble (super-boring), and Risk (takes too long). My top ten is based on a combination of fun, challenging, and entertaining. Feel free to list some of your own favorites in the comments here or on Facebook.
 
10. Pente
A mainstay of college dorm study breaks at Mizzou, this simple game is similar to "Go," which experts say is the oldest human game in existence. The goal is simple: get five stones in a row or capture five pairs of stones from your opponent. We wasted hours of time that we should have been studying playing this game instead.


9. Mouse Trap
There's not a single one of you who grew up in the 1970s who didn't have this game. It was less of a game and more of an excuse to build the Rube Goldberg contraption that fell on the plastic mouse game piece. If your friends or siblings weren't around to play, you could just build it yourself.


8. Catan
A more recent addition, this deceptively simple game requires you to gather resources in order to build roads, settlements, and cities faster than your opponents, but you also can trade and collaborate with them to reach your goal. Since this game was featured on the 100th episode of "The Big Bang Theory," I can't play this game without thinking, "I have wood; I need sheep. Who has sheep for my wood?"


7. Taboo
One of the great 1980s-era party games, this game required you to get your team to guess a word on a card, but there were also five "taboo" words that you couldn't say to describe the word. For example, if the word was "hamburger," you couldn't use the words "beef, patty, bun, pickles, drive-thru" as part of your description. Just to make it more fun, your opponent, sitting next to you, had a buzzer to buzz you if you used a taboo word. Great game for making enemies out of friends.


6. Sorry!
The world's best game for torturing siblings, especially younger ones. Game play is remedial: you just flip a card and move the right number of spaces, but when you land on another player's space, you got to send them back to "Start"...and right into the grip of rage and insanity! Mwaa-haa-haa-haa!!!


5. Trivial Pursuit
The last time my family played this game with me, it was all of them (seven or eight people) against me by myself. Guess who won? To this day, this game is forbidden at family gatherings.


4. Pictionary
Drawing games have become a common activity in many other party games, such as "Cranium" (probably 11 or 12 on an expanded list for me) and my new "Furt" purchase, so it's easy to forget the perfection of the original. I prefer to play on twin whiteboards like Burt Reynolds' "Win, Lose, or Draw" game show, but the principle is still the same.


3. Dominion
A strategic card game set in a medieval kingdom, this game was introduced to me in the aforementioned church game group, and I was hooked from the beginning. The brilliant part is that you can mix and match the card groupings each time you play, making the game different every time. You have to think in terms of both short-term gains as well as long-term strategy. I could play this game in a 72-hour marathon without hesitation.


2. Dark Tower
A birthday present in 1981 (my 13th), this condensed take on "Dungeons & Dragons" featured board play spaces with an electronic tower in the middle of the game that acted as the digital dungeon master, determining the outcome of battles, haggling for goods, and final victory. Good luck finding a working version of this game; if you can even find it on eBay, prices start around $300. Why no one has updated this game today is a mystery to me.


1. Catchphrase
The party game of choice both in our house and among most of our friends, Catchphrase combines the skill of "Password"—the game gives you a word in a simple LED readout, and you have to get your team to guess the word without using any part of it—with the random frustration of "Hot Potato." The game has a beeping timer, and if your team is caught with the device when the timer goes off, the other team gets a point. We almost always play Men vs. Women, and as the years have gone by, the fun hasn't diminished one little bit.

What to Expect from 2017

It's a curious function of the Western Gregorian calendar that the movement from December 31 to January 1 causes such a hubbub of reflection, contemplation, and determination from so many people. I suppose that the concept of a "new year" could be traced in terms of evolution or anthropology to the coming of spring as a celebration of surviving the winter months. In the modern world, it's an opportunity to restart, to get a free "do-over" with whatever you wanted to accomplish the year before but didn't get to complete—or even start, in some cases.

Personal resolutions are pretty much a waste of time; most people don't last two weeks with diets, exercise plans, quitting personal vices, etc. We've all been there. I cultivated a way of life that focuses exclusively on the present 24-hour day, so I tend do avoid long-term planning beyond what I need to live safe, sane, and sober within the boundaries of my morning and evening tooth-brushing.

Having said that, there are a few things I'm looking forward to in the year upcoming. The biggest change for me is professional; my academic department at the college where I teach was merged with two others, and I chose not to be considered for the new chair's position, so my four-year stint as department chair came to an end at midnight last night. What this means is more time to grade papers at work and more time at home for having a real life again.

Speaking of that real life, I'm doing some exciting things with my writing career. I should have an announcement in a few days about the future of my first book, "Dylan's Treasure." In the meantime, I'll continue working on my revision of its sequel, "The Spring of Llanfyllin," collaborating with a friend on a collection of short stories and starting a new novel from scratch. Oh, and I'm going to try to blog on a more regular basis, both here and at my sports site, "The Sandlot."

Some travel goals: reduced workload means reduced pay, so we're keeping it real vacation-wise...real close and real cheap. Fortunately, there's a lot to do in Missouri, so we're going to visit Big Springs, Taum Sauk Mountain, Elephant Rocks, Johnson's Shut-Ins, and all of the fun and almost-free things to do in and around St. Louis Forest Park. Since my parents live in Farmington, they are strategically located for free lodging and food—thanks, Mom & Dad!

For those of you in the Poplar Bluff area, I'm starting a new study series for my Thursday night New Testament exegetical experience, theROAD. We meet Thursday nights at 6 p.m. at New Life Christian Church United on North Barron Road next to the fire station. We always have good snacks, and I do my best to dispense wisdom and insight (or heresy and blasphemy if you're religious), and we're always glad to have seekers, skeptics, and the curious join us.

I have a few more things on my mind about the 364 more days of this new year ahead of us, but I don't want to exhaust potential blog topics on day one, so you'll just have to stay tuned in. As for the rest of 2017, I guess we'll just have to wait and see, won't we? When it happens, I will try to have something meaningful to say about it. If I do have a resolution in mind, it's to do my best to be kind to others. I think it's going to both be needed and appreciated in the days to come.

May your new year be happy, joyous, and free!

My Viral Video

http://mentalfloss.com/article/58771/27-offbeat-college-essay-topics
Essay #9 of 27

You've just reached your one millionth hit on your YouTube video--what is the video about?

Thanks to the success of Disney's purchase of Lucasfilm and their reboot of the Star Wars franchise, they decide, after the conclusion of the Skywalker saga with "Star Wars: Episode XII, The Balance of the Force," to completely re-do George Lucas's misbegotten prequel trilogy, a.k.a. Episodes I-III. In order to find the best story, they invite aspiring writers and filmmakers to post 15-minute videos showing a completely rebooted opening sequence to Episode I.

Working with filmmaking wizard Sean Warren and a cast of aspiring young actors from the college theater department, I finally put my vision for how Episode I should have started all those years ago. The million-plus hits are the votes that my version gets from public votes selecting my story treatment as the winner for the initiative to forever erase the travesty of Jar-Jar Binks.

Here's how my video opens: We see Obi-Wan Kenobi flying his starfighter through the crowded skies of Coruscant. He's tracking reports of dark side activity in one of the dangerous neighborhoods surrounding the capitol. He lands his spacecraft and secures it with his built-in droid. He fails to notice the young teen boy lurking in the shadows of a nearby alley.

After Kenobi leaves, the boy emerges from the shadows and removes a small electronic device from his cloak. He plugs the device into an access panel on Kenobi's ship and overrides the droid's security measures, ordering the droid to open the cockpit and start the ship's engines. Kenobi, now several blocks away, looks up to see his ship flying off without him.

We see the teenager flying into a high-security area by using the ship's computer to transmit the Jedi Knight's security code. Once he lands the ship, he breaks into a series of vaults to steal Republic currency. He leaves the area without attracting any attention, then flies the ship to an illicit dealer who pays him for the ship and promises him no one will be able to find it. "Don't worry about it, Skywalker," the dealer says. "This ship will be harder to trace than you are."

"No chance of that," Anakin tells him, holding his hand up to the dealer. "I was never here. You and I have never met. You have no memory of me."

"You and I have never met," the dealer says, in a far-away voice, as Anakin once again fades into the shadows.

The last thing we see in the video is Republic security officers entering the Jedi Temple with a warrant for Obi-Wan Kenobi's arrest, since security records show that his ship accessed a secure area where vaults were robbed the night before. Obi-Wan is forced to admit to the Jedi Council that his ship had been stolen the night before, news that is met with laughter from the Council. Our final shot is a red-faced, embarrassed Obi-Wan...

Maybe we don't want a second season after all...

One of the really joyful surprises of the summer was watching Netflix's superb eight-episode love letter to 1980s movies, "Stranger Things." The praise for the show has been effusive and well-deserved, and its success has led to the (network? It's not a network...what do we call these things now? Content providers? Ugh...) to Netflix thrilling fans with the announcement of a second season. Great news, right?

We're all richer than our parents!

Well, not so fast. We might want to consider a couple of cautionary tales first. Last summer's sensation was USA Network's "Mr. Robot," another mishmash of TV, movie, and cultural influences that made for absolutely addictive viewing. The brainchild of writer/director Sam Esmail, he originally envisioned his story as a feature film, but he created some of the most compelling television since the heyday of AMC's "Breaking Bad."

Jeff South? Never heard of him.

I was excited for the start of this summer's second season of "Mr. Robot." However, I'm six episodes into the new season and still waiting for the excitement to start. All of the same elements are there, but the magic is missing. To be honest, most of the episodes are just boring. The dynamic between the characters has shifted in the worst way possible, and now we are left without a protagonist to relate to or root for. I'm committed to finishing out the season out of respect for the greatness of season one, but it's a significant disappointment so far.

Why is season two so damn boring?

We all know about the pure genius of season one of HBO's "True Detective." The collaboration between writer Nic Pizzolatto and director Cary Fukunaga brought us two of the most memorable characters in recent television, played with award-caliber brilliance by Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey. Yes, you read that correctly—Woody from "Cheers" and that stoner guy from "Dazed and Confused." Every moment of every episode was filled with dread and anticipation; you couldn't take your eyes off the screen for even a moment.

It's complicated...

Then we had season two of "True Detective," which I watched from beginning to end, hoping that the brilliance of season one would repeat itself. It did not. I think that Colin Ferrell and Vince Vaughn are just as capable as actors as Woody and Matthew, but Pizzolatto was pressured into delivering a script of the same quality as season one in a short amount of time, and Fukunaga bailed as the director. The flaws were obvious from the beginning.

It's terrible...

I once asked college bud Mike Tucker why so many bands had great debut albums but disappointing second efforts. What he told me was so obvious: bands spend years working on a dozen great songs that go on that first record; when they hit it big, the record company expects the next album right away, and it's almost never as good as the first. I think the shows we see that have magnificent first seasons—especially the two I singled out here—suffer from the same phenomenon. Both "Mr. Robot" and "True Detective" seemed to come out of nowhere, but they were culminations of years of work by their creators.

Now we have the Duffer brothers, creators of "Stranger Things," facing the same challenge. Their success was a wonderful surprise. Now, can they come through again on short notice? Consider these points: a) Can he get another great performance out of Winona Ryder? Can she do something else besides distraught mother, because we won't want to see that again. b) The kids, who were the heart of the show, are going to be a year (or two) older the next time around, and kids change A LOT between 11 and 13. How will that affect the dynamic? c) We've already seen the Upside Down; where will the story take us next? d) How will the elements that we loved in season one be kept intact while still telling us a new, fresh story?

50 percent of the girls in my 1983 high school yearbook looked like this.

Speaking as a writer, I spent years working on my first novel, and years more crafting a sequel. If all my dreams came true, and both books were published nationally to great success, could I crank out a third in less than a year? J.K. Rowling has admitted that the pressures of publishing deadlines took some of the polish off her work. I think the pressure must have simply paralyzed George R. R. Martin; we may never actually see a final "Song of Ice and Fire" book.

Dream on, suckers!

Sometimes, maybe we should just be happy with one perfect season. The disappointment we experience when we expect lighting to strike twice just isn't worth it.