Game Time!

Have you ever heard of the game UpWords? If you have, maybe you have seen it in your parent's game closet, tucked way in the back with a little dust on it. Or, maybe you found it at a thrift store like us! We really like word games (Scrabble, Boggle, Razzle, and Option) and even though this one isn't our favorite word game, it had been awhile since we played it, so we dusted it off last night. It was fun! And Andrew won...with a score of 167 to Brianna's 160. If only I could have played that "J!" We do have a lot of games and we love playing them! Over the last (almost) five years of marriage, we've slowly and steadily acquired many games to add to our collection. Nearly all of them have been purchased at a thrift store, which is a great way to go! Instead of paying $15-$25 for a game, we've payed anywhere from 25 cents to $4...and we know it works! Note to self: if you are going to try this tactic, plan a little extra time at the thrift store to play this game to make sure all the pieces are there. Actually, we just rip off the tape, open it up, and see if it looks like the pieces are all there, and call it good. When we were first married and on a limited budget, our date night would go something like this. We have $5 to spend...go to Del Taco and buy five tacos or go to D.I. (a local thrift store) and buy a game we've never heard of and play it that night. Usually, we bought the game, which is why our game storage now looks like this:

We store our games inside of a large buffet, so there are even games behind some of these that you can't see. And, this is only one side of the buffet! We love games! Some of our all-time favorites are:

Boggle

Scrabble

Backgammon

Battleship

Razzle

Phase 10

Killer Uno

The Great Dalmuti

Othello (Andrew)

Beyond Balderdash (Andrew really loves this one!)

Mad Gab (Andrew)

Rummikub (Brianna)

Taboo (Brianna)

So, next time you finding yourself wandering the aisles of a thrift store with $5 burning a hole in your pocket, go to the game section and look for UpWords. If you don't like it, just give it right back to the store and feel good about donating $5 to your favorite thrift store!

The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Have you ever had one of those terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days? Well, this past week, Andrew and I both had one of those days. It seemed like we were just frustrated, annoyed, you name it. We really did feel like Alexander in that book, and we couldn't get over it. The next day felt just as bad.

So what did we do? Well, after feeling grumpy and annoyed all day, we went to Hawaii! We turned up the heat so we'd feel really warm and we put on some leis. For dinner I made teriyaki chicken with pineapple in it, because that was as close to Hawaiian cuisine as we could get and then we sat on the living room floor and ate our delicious meal. The picture doesn't do it justice; Andrew lit some candles and we turned out the lights...so it was hard to get a good picture. But, the food was good, we had a great time, and we got over it. If you ever find yourself in one of those no good, very bad days, forget Australia (read the book), just go to Hawaii!

I am The Great Dalmuti

Andrew here. Over New Years, we visited my family for a few days in Utah and had a bit of fun. Basically we sat around all day playing games, eating food, telling stories, and laughing. It was a good time!

Some of the top games we played while we were there were The Great Dalmuti and an old computer game that we had growing up called Scorched Earth ("the mother of all games"). Have you ever played any of these games? Well, if you have, they are both a lot of fun. If you haven't, don't let the titles throw you off; they are pretty fun games. So The Great Dalmuti is a card game that is similar to Scum where people have different positions or ranks depending on who wins or loses each hand. After acquiring some basic skills in this game it became quite competitive. We even took it to the extreme of wearing certain hats depending on what rank you were. The Great Dalmuti wore the King's crown, 2nd in command was the Viking, the Greater Peon (lowest) wore the Jester hat, and the 2nd lowest wore the three-cornered hat. Anyways, we had a lot of fun playing it. When you get a talkative family around a table playing a funny game, it is just a lot of fun!

Here are some pictures from the game:

(l to r: Andrew's dad Orrin, brother Grant, Andrew the Great Dalmuti, and brother Jon)

You can't always be the Great Dalmuti.

There are a lot of emotions in this game!

Andrew's brother Grant was a Viking in a former life.

Scorched Earth was one of our favorite games growing up (when I say our, I mean my siblings, but especially the boys in our family). The game has very basic graphics. The best way to help you visualize what it is like is if you are looking at your computer screen and you were to draw a zig-zaggy line across the screen. Then put a few dots along the line. Those dots are the tanks and the zig-zag line is the mountainous terrain in which the tanks are situated in. You can buy all sorts of different weapons to shoot at the other tanks and you win a round by blowing up the other tanks. As we were playing this game, it brought back so many fun memories of sitting on a wooden bench for hours in front of the computer playing this game. As we were selecting the weapons to buy it was fun remembering how some of the weapons were just like cheating because it made it really easy to get the other tank. For example, picturing the same terrain I just explained with the zig-zag line; if you were one of the unlikely tanks at the bottom of the hill, all it took was a simple weapon called a Baby Roller and you were done for. The way rollers work is that you aim your barrel anywhere on the hill above the tank and when you shoot it and it hits the hill, it just rolls all the way down to the bottom and blows up the tank. So it is kind of fun sometimes when you go first and you're not the tank at the bottom.

Some of my other favorite weapons are the MIRV and the Baby Sandhog (the Baby Sandhog costs less than a regular Sandhog; this game taught me how to be frugal from an early age). Also, you can't forget parachutes. Parachutes will make you last a lot longer in the game. Without going into too much detail, the game is just a lot of fun!

After playing a few rounds of this, we realized we were boring everyone else and we needed to go back to playing The Great Dalmuti.

(from l to r in this picture: Grant, Robbie, me, and Jon)