Game Night

I recently picked up a game called Quad*Doku. It's kind of a cross between Boggle, Scrabble and Sudoku and it looked like the kind of game that my mom and my sisters and I would have fun with.

So with the snow today, my Mom, sister (AchingHope) and I pulled it out to play for the first time.

You make four four letter words that connect at the corners and then different letters have different numbers which, ideally, should add up to 10. We decided not to play by numbers because we didn't want to keep score, so we just made words. Which is a lot harder than you would think.

My Mom LOVES word games. She does crossword puzzles and things all the time, and is a complete monster at Boggle. So while we were playing, she kept shouting things out at us, telling us what we "could" do if we wanted. Finally we enacted a gag rule. This is the rule - "Mom cannot speak if it is not her turn".

Pretty simple right :)

As we got toward the end it got tougher and tougher to do, because your pool of available letters is much smaller. It was AchingHope's turn and she couldn't quite figure out what to do. Mom starts to say something, but then stops herself. AchingHope and I are staring at the board when I glance up and see an alarming sight.

Mom's face is bright red and somehow growing round. It looks like a cherry tomato. Both hands are clamped over her mouth and I can practically see the letters fighting to escape her lips.

I think it's the closest I've ever come to seeing someone spontaneously combust.

AchingHope sees and is just as alarmed, so she says, "Tell me! You're gonna explode!" But Mom shakes her head, determined to be good.

"You can help if you're asked," I say. "She asked. It's okay."

"She doesn't mean it," Mom mumbles behind her fingers, which sets us all of into a fresh set of giggles.

Finally we convince her to speak and her head returns to its normal size and color. Crisis averted.

As we get to the very end we now only have a handful of letters left - 1 or 2 random consonants and a ton of vowels. So AchingHope decides to just finish it off by creating verification words... :)

One of the last ones she stacks is FAFE.

So I say, "I will eat your fafe off!"

Which sounds completely ridiculous if you say it fast and growly like. That sets us all off again and we spend the next five minutes growling, "I will eat your fafe off!" to each other.

Ahhhhhh..... game night. Gotta love it :D