Fresh Air and the Ticket Queen

Last night, we had dinner outside on our patio. Tabitha made this awesome shrimp stir-fry. Which may have even rivaled the Thai food, that we had picked up for date night, the night before. My wife is an amazing cook.

Sitting outside, enjoying the fresh air and cool breeze, I think we all felt liberated from the house. The warmer temperatures we’ve been experiencing, combined with humidity, have triggered us running the air conditioning.

Air conditioning, in the State of Texas, is a serious thing. Summers here make it feel like you are suddenly an astronaut. Your home, your car, even your place of work become your climate controlled spaceship. Every once in awhile, you’ll adventure out for an away mission. Perhaps you’ll even venture forth to work in the lawn followed up by a mandatory dip in the pool. But eventually, summers here make the pool water match the outside temperature. Nothing like diving into 80-85 degree water on a 90-100 degree day. Ah, so refreshing!

The Coronavirus, or as those more in the know call it COVID-19, has forced upon us social distancing as well as self quarantine. Even as the Governor of Texas opens up the State, the virus damage has already been inflicted. Self quarantine has triggered those mid-summer cabin fever feelings already. It is only May, and I am ready to escape the spaceship–I mean house–and enjoy fresh air.

That is why last night, I enjoyed spending time with family outdoors. Being able to enjoy the non-spaceship air; being able to eat good food and not eat family. We even managed to get a game of Ticket to Ride going. Wyatt (green train cars) destroyed Tabitha (yellow train cars) and I (red train cars).

Playing Ticket to Ride, as a family, is a completely different experience than the silent games Tabitha and I play together. No longer is the game a battle between two powerful rail tycoons. Instead, Wyatt introduces a random element to the mix, another player to foil our track laying schemes.

As Wyatt cut me off from a crucial move, I whined out loud, “No!”. And then I kept whining until he won. Darth Vader would be proud.

It’s interesting to think that one day we could have another Ticket to Ride player in our house (nothing happening on the adoption front, FYI, all is quiet). Until that day, I’ll be working on destroying a little boy’s dreams… I mean… blocking a young man’s trains.

As the final points were counted, I ended up placing third. I am in no way salty about my ranking, as I am used to being beaten by Tabitha. Tabitha is the Ticket queen. Or maybe I should say, she was?

Switching things up

I had been meaning to talk with Tabitha about our evenings. I felt like we, as a family, had gotten into a bad habit of not interacting / watching television every night. Some of our passivity I understood, the Texas heat zaps you. Summer needs to end! But I felt like we could be more purposeful with our time.

Tabitha ended up approaching me first with the idea that we needed to turn off the TV. I had to have surprised her when I agreed. We then sat down and hashed out how our evenings will look moving forward. During the week:

Boardgames
Drawing lessons
Playing
Reading aloud
Family Devotions
Anything else non-electronic we can do together

We agreed to reduce our family television time down to one night a week. The weekends, we decided, will be more lax with screen time. Sunday afternoons are tailor made for movies and/or video games.

The Game of Life – Pirates of the Caribbean edition… Tab and I picked this up at Walt Disney World on our honeymoon. Game features ship-to-ship battles and a solid piratey theme. Makes the regular version of Life seem boring.

Somehow we ended up with a pirate themed game night. Loot (the card game above) was different.

Our first week was a success! We set aside a night for family devotions (10 minutes); we dove into some different boardgames (evidence above).

I picked up the first book in John Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice series to read aloud with Wyatt. We read two to three chapters a night before Wyatt heads off to bed for his own reading time. I’m trying to introduce him to new authors/series to feed his voracious reading appetite. Wyatt has also always loved Tab and I reading aloud to him (I hope this never ends). If I have learned anything as a dad, you can share your love of reading with your children. Just gotta read!

This week, I’m looking to try out a new devotional book for our devotional time: Marty Machowski’s Long Story Short: Ten-Minute Devotions to Draw Your Family to God. I’ll let you know how it goes.

What do your evenings look like with your family? Does the TV reign supreme? Ever thought of shaking things up? Let’s talk in the comments below!

For the Love of Strategy Games

I blame my Grandpa Ayers for my love of strategy games. How he taught my siblings and I how to move Chess pieces around the board. Which then translated to late night Chess matches while on camping trips with him. There is something nostalgic about playing Chess while eating prunes, graham crackers, and M&M’s. It is no wonder my stomach was usually so upset on those trips into the mountains.

Note: I’m the kid in the far back with the mop hair.

I have tried to share my love of strategy games with my son Wyatt. Teaching him how to move the knight, the rook, and the bishop in Chess. Also sharing with him the other game my Grandpa loved, Stratego. All the while branching out into Hall family favorites Carcassonne and Catan Jr. (I’ll note here: Never play Catan Jr. with Wyatt. He will win. Kid quickly figured out how to game the game.)

This past December, I decided to go deeper into the strategy game depths. Having read reviews, I intentionally asked for My Little Scythe for Christmas.

My Little Scythe has been perfect at teaching us how to see the bigger game picture amidst all the smaller moving pieces. I love it.

Wyatt recently came home from a homeschool park day with a deck of Magic: The Gathering (MTG) cards. He said that the other homeschool kids had been playing and had taught him how to play. Now I know that MTG can be an expensive hobby, due to having to buy new cards blindly in order to build powerful decks. I wanted to push past the expense AND further our strategy horizons, so I picked up a box of Dice Throne: Season 2 – Gunslinger v. Samurai.

My wife, Tabitha, is amazing at analyzing instructions and then teaching them to a group. (I think this has something to do with her teaching third grade for eight years. 🙂 ) But after looking over the Dice Throne instructions, she proclaimed, “This is a rule book, not an instruction book that describes how to play the game.”

A few hours of mowing the backyard later…

We decided to consult Watch It Played with Rodney Smith:

Which we found more helpful than the official Dice Throne video. But we still wanted to see the game played out. So we watched a bit of a Game the Game episode:

That was all on Sunday. Due to how crazy our week has been, we have yet to play ourselves. But I wanted to ask you…

Have you ever bought a game and thought, this is overwhelming!

Tell me about it in the comments below.

How Night Terrors Forced My Family To Unplug

You never forget the moment where you wake up to your child screaming. The bleary-eyed rushing to their room only to find them awake but not awake. The early night terrors Wyatt experienced were full of him:

Tracking objects, with his eyes, that were not there… but if you watched him, you’d think there was something.
Shivering, teeth chattering to the point you’d think that they might break.
Pure terror.

Night terrors make a parent feel helpless as it is hard to convince someone, who isn’t awake, that there is nothing trying to kill them.

Tabitha and I started to notice a pattern though. Looking at our bedtime routine, we were watching TV, specifically playing videogames, up until the point Wyatt went to bed. So we re-evaluated our evening routine and turned off the television.

For me, being the dad who loves sharing gaming with his kid, this killed me. KILLED ME! The effort it takes to read a book aloud or play a boardgame is far more than turning on the TV and playing a game. Call this being a lazy dad at the time, I admit it now. But our evenings changed for the better. The night terrors, which seem to be caused by a combination of electronic stimuli and tiredness, slowly faded away. Over the years, with each book we read aloud, each boardgame we played, we slowly learned to interact more as a family in the evenings.

Today, I can’t say everything is perfect. The night terrors like to rear their heads on the occasion (but are more infrequent). We still watch TV shows before bed, but we have learned that certain TV shows don’t seem to trigger the night terrors as much as others (I think it has something to do with the amount of blinking lights). Our family reading time has segued into Wyatt having his own reading time at night.

Smart parenting often requires sacrifice. In our case, that has meant moving any gaming time away from bedtime (we’ve noticed that an hour buffer works). I’ve learned that I can still game with my son but that often it is good to shake things up with no screens. The battlefield of the Chess board, the trophies of My Little Scythe, all work together to make non-screen memories and keep the night terrors at bay.

Unwritten Rules: I Must See the Ending

Our good friends recently bought us Qwirkle, a tile-based game that has the universal appeal of Rummikub. Qwirkle pits 2-4 players into matching colors and shapes for maximum points per turn.

Qwirkle comes with a cloth bag that serves two purposes:

Serves as a place to store all of the tiles when done with the game.
Acts as a draw pile/bag to pass around, as players must keep 6 tiles in their hands at all times.

For me, the bag of tiles also acts as a visual indicator to show me how much longer the game is going to take to play. One of my unwritten rules, with tabletop games, is that I have to be able to visually see/know that the game is going to end. Too many long games of Risk, Settlers of Catan, and Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot have burned me out on 2+ hour games.

Knowing that the game is going to end gives me hope; Hope that I won’t be treated as a tabletop hostage.

A few games that embrace this rule:

King Domino
Carcassonne
Chicken Foot (a Dominos-like variation)
Cranium Whoonu

Congrats to Game Store Prophets for 5 Years!

Wanted to take a moment and congratulate Mike Perna and the Game Store Prophets Crew for 5 years of podcasting excellence. I love the work that Mike does. Not just talking about the concept of a boardgame ministry but actually putting action behind those words. Congrats, Mike!

July 22, 2011 – the first episode of Game Store Prophets went live. We had no idea what we were starting. We were a couple of geeks who happened to have served in ministry positions who thought there’d be something in the idea of bringing those two sides of our lives together into one place. Five years after tackling the oliphant in the room, GSP is just part of the work that we do as part of the larger work of InnRoads Ministries. We’ve seen new hosts, had a number of wonderful guests, and connected with people across the world. – Read More Here

Lazy Sunday

Sunday afternoons always seem to drag on into infinity…

Lately, the weather has been rather warm for spring time in East Texas. The 80 degree days have started reminding me of our blazing hot/humid summers. All in all, it is far too early for weather like this.

Yesterday, in an attempt to stave off the cabin fever Sunday’s induce, my wife, son, and I piled into the family sedan and headed off to Target. Our mission: To spend some giftcards we had recently received.

Walking through the store, my wife and I looked at dinner plates, blenders, and solar powered lanterns–I love these things!–. Eventually we made our way to the boardgame aisle. It was then that my wife spotted this:

Now, I have found that boardgames can really be a huge hit or a miss. Usually, I won’t buy a new boardgame unless we have had a chance to test-drive it, per se. But, having giftcards to spend, we decided that perhaps it was time to Pass the Popcorn. Now, for those of you who haven’t played, Pass the Popcorn is a movie trivia game.

To play, one player reads out the top of the card (“1980 Comedy”), and then the other player asks a question depending on what tile they have selected (Tiles range from Quotes, Story, Cast, Characters, etc.). If you guess the movie title right, you win!

Long after the Target trip and soon after my son had been put to bed for the night, my wife and I tried the game out. We had a really good time!

Sometimes its nice to just turn off the TV and enjoy spending time with those around you.

JohnnyBGamer

Writing from the junction point of faith, fatherhood, and video games.

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