Autumn makes her best I-have-a-wicked-knife-rawr face
This memorial day weekend (which is why Monday's post comes a day late) found my wife and I attending the Scottish festival. Just to be clear, I love bagpipes. I have requested them at my funeral so that they can play something really sad and make people cry (its always good to have a little insurance for these types of things). So, going to the festival and seeing dancing, highland games, and music sounded great. But I have to say that it ended up (to continue the overuse of the interweb meme) very meh.
The sword dancing had 100% less swords than advertised. The highland games occurred very matter-of-factly without any real fanfare or audience involvment. There were a number of vendors that had cool weapons or celtic/british type fare, but there's only so long you can window shop. I also enjoy renaissance faires (does anything scream nerd quite so loudly?), and the scottish festival wasn't as good. The immersive element was missing, and there was no one pretending to be from ye olde anywhere. So, next year, its the ren faire for me.
More importantly, I sat my beautiful wife down and we played some major board games. She is thoroughly enjoying Jaipur - especially because she won the last game we played. We also played some Agricola and a 5 player Puerto Rico. It turns out, she likes games when she's played them several times and feels like she knows all the situations that could arise and possible strategies. So, my plan to convert her into a board game lover is to pick one or two games, and play those several times until she's comfortable with all of the rules so that her enjoyment can flourish. My theory is that once she falls in love with three or four games, she'll be more eager to try new ones.
I believe my theory is sound. We will begin Phase 1 of the implementation of this, my Master Plan, in the coming week. Progress will be reported here. Anyone have additional suggestions?
Too bad about the festival, I learned a bit about Scottish sword dancing during a production of Brigadoon in high school, it was fun.
ReplyDeleteGlad you are converting well. I'm pretty good about plunging into new games, but definitely feel better about it when I know them!
My two favorite tips...
ReplyDelete1)Make sure she likes the subject matter. No zombie games if she hates horror.
2)Know the rules. There's nothing worse than having a game explained while the person is frantically paging through the rulebook.
Good luck!
Nicole
I think she feels similarly. She also recently indicated that she'd help me on a test play of a new game I got. So we may see how she feels when we both don't know what we're doing :)
ReplyDeleteGood tips. So far, I think I've held true to both of those. I'll let everyone know how it goes.
ReplyDelete