Saturday 5/27/23
The four of us Robertses who were camped/cabin-ed at Deep Creek do enjoy games. Scott and Katie are both highly analytical and extremely competitive. Scott likes games with a high strategy-to-luck ratio. Katie and Andrew enjoy cooperative games. I like word games, which I should do well at but which I seem to lose to Scott ~84% of the time, so it's convenient that I am not at all competitive. Andrew is more competitive than I am, but less than Scott or Katie, and he's a whiz at Quiddler. Scott's vocabulary and spelling skills are less refined than Katie's, Andrew's, and mine, but he tends to do well at word games, perhaps because he takes his turns very slowly and evaluates every conceivable possibility—and then some. Frequently heard: "Did you set a timer on Dad?"
All that to say that it's impossible to find games that all four of us, much less all six (or now seven) Team Robertses enjoy, so over the years we've learned to provide options and then let subsets of folks play what they want without pressuring others to join in.
But there's one game that some of us are always up for, so Saturday afternoon we (Scott, Patty, Katie, and either Milt or Becky, depending on availability) played Bridge at our picnic table. As I recall, my team did not fare so well. This didn't particularly bother me, but I did feel bad for my partner(s), sometimes Milt and other times Scott. Thankfully, they are both scholars and gentlemen, and they were gracious to me when I made dumb mistakes in playing or failed to appropriately evaluate nuances in bidding.
Meanwhile, before our trip, Scott had asked that each of us Robertses cook one night for the four of us. Andrew and Katie had gone grocery shopping at Ingles and gotten what they each needed for their meals plus a few groceries for Scott and me, and that evening Andrew used the Blackstone to prepare us a delicious meal of pan-seared chicken and asparagus along with a side dish of alfredo noodles with broccoli. He really enjoys carefree, creative cooking and does it very well, inside or out!
Chef Andrew at work (or play?)
Saturday evening the four of us sorted through our available games and decided to play Bohnanza, and, because our camper is fairly tight, we played with scavenged seating around the small wooden table in the compact kitchen/living area of Andrew's and Katie's tiny cabin. Bohnanza is a game that's ostensibly about beans (black beans, stink beans, cocoa beans, wax beans, coffee beans, etc.), but is really about logic, odds, and trading.
In our family, for as many years as any of us can remember, Scott has been the most consistent game-winner, so the obvious and unspoken strategy for the rest of us in almost any game is to work together to try to keep him from winning. This we did that night in the cabin as the rain poured down, and in the end the three of us achieved our goal! Incredibly, we EACH ended up with 19 points (who ever heard of a three-way tie in Bohnanza?!?) and Scott had some score less than that.
But he was especially bummed because of the way we accomplished our victory; we simply refused to trade with him. This was very frustrating to Scott, who later told me, "I don't mind losing, but this is a trading game, and if I can't trade with anyone, it isn't fun for me. I just need to remember that next time." His disappointment made me feel really bad, and I decided that since I don't care very much about winning, in the future he and I should just play games that we both enjoy and that frustrate each of us minimally. There really are some of those! = ) Hmm... maybe I should make a list...
That said, we all enjoyed the "sweetness of the tree" as we continued to work our way through Chainsaw Bars, Cookie Dough Brownies, and Skittles—one of Andrew's birthday gifts from Katie—around the Bohnanza table.
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