This is what happens when the 5 year old makes up the rules.
‘You can’t have purple trees! There are no purple trees,’ the 9 year old argues from the back seat.
‘Yes, you can, this is my game and there are purple trees!’ the 6 year old replies.
I was asked to referee…I don’t think the 9 year old was too happy. In my world, there can be purple trees. I like it that way.
I may have said before, but I’m not sure that I have so I will say again, we like to play board games. We don’t play Monopoly or Risk and I only got Uno for the 5 year old when he turned 6 because he said it was ‘what I always wanted!’ No, most of those games are too urbane for our little family. We play games involving stacks and stacks of cards and tokens in buckets and often little figures we move around the table that is just not quite big enough.
Until fairly recently, I have allowed everyone else (even the 6 year old) to tell me the rules, because I didn’t quite get the mechanism behind them. I’m used to card games and I play a killer gin, but save modifiers and converting the odds in the remaining dice to the probability of completing a task are kind of new to me. I have a hard enough time trying to figure out the rules behind polite company in every day life, let alone those set in another universe.
A while back, when the 6 year old was still 5, he set up a game for us to play on the living room floor. He made up the rules, as he likes to do and I played along. After a while I had to write down what he said because he is in the same breath the most simple and complex human being and it boggles my mind. I’m wondering if somewhere in here I will start to understand the spirit of playing, despite not understanding all the rules?
Quotes from the game:
‘Kaboosha…it is disabled!’
– As my tank blows up…a lot of my tanks blew up.
‘You might get snake eyes…you-might-get-snake-eyes.’
– I think this was supposed to be a good thing.
‘Well, in my game, tanks fire missiles.’
– After being told by his big brother that tanks do not fire air to air missiles.
‘If you want to get snake eyes you have to get double six. … oooh, so close. Crippled…actually, dismobilized. You were so close!’
– I think this (again) was supposed to be a good thing. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that double six is not ‘snake eyes’. I am not sure that I want that phone call from the teacher.
‘It flies into little tiny peaches.’
– Tee Hee!
‘There’s a lot of things I want to be when I grow up…an artist…actually, there’s only two. An artist and a board game maker.’
– He’s got high ambition.
‘Pretty intense, isn’t it?’
– His actual words.
‘Mom, pause game. You can definitely do what you need to do now.’
– I’m not sure that I asked him to stop the game because I had to do something. I am always doing that though…maybe he just knew.
‘What? She puts her blowey-up things next to her soldiers!’
– The rules being a mystery to me, I guess this was a faux pas?
‘You don’t use cats!…and plus there is no cats in warriors.’
– I tried to use the cat as a weapon of mass destruction. Apparently this was against regulations.
‘Add him to your experience pile.’
– A pile of toy soldiers that could be resurrected if necessary…they were placed right next to the pile of dinosaurs that would be used in the ‘next phase’.
And perhaps my favorite:
Me – ‘I don’t understand.’
– I really didn’t. My head hurt and I wanted to praise his creativeness and inguinity, but there was dinner to make.
The small one’s answer and the point of this post? –
‘I know! Good game, isn’t it?!’
xb.
undeadpollyanna 