11 - 12 - Desert

I love playing games. If there's a game to be played, I want to play it. Whether I was good at the game or not, I'd want to play. My favorite growing up was always Monopoly (but no one else ever wanted to play). I was always the car or the top hat. There really wasn't any game I hated, except for chess. I was terrible at it, and my brother was great. Whenever my family would go on road trips (which was a lot BTW) my brother, sister & I would play games in the car. We spent many trips playing Hearts among other travel size games. As I grew up, I was introduced to new and better games.

Currently, my favorite board game is a game called Settlers Of Catan. It's a bit like Risk (which is a fantastic game) and a bit like Monopoly. The goal is to expand by building settlements, roads and cities. You build by getting resources based on the dice roll. I began playing this when I was in college at my college group. We would play it very frequently. There was one game I played where I got my college group nickname from. My nickname was 11-12-Desert. Now without going into the intricacies of the game or my decision to build there, just know that it was a terrible placement, in fact the worst place to build in the entire game. But I didn't know that, I was just starting out. I never lived it down. Every time we played the game after that, that's how they referred to me.

I share this with you, because playing games brings people together and develops community like you wouldn't believe. It doesn't even matter whether they are individual games or team games. When you play games, you bond, you talk, you joke, you trash talk (in a loving way), you form inside jokes, and like in my college group, you give people nicknames. Games force people to interact with each other. Every one just has a good time when they're playing games even if it's a game they've never played before. I tell you about my love for games and what games can bring because, tomorrow night, is our Crash Cranium game night. It's going to be a fun time of hanging out and playing games. I want to encourage all of you junior high students to head over to the Loft tomorrow night from 6-8 PM and bring a friend. Who knows, you may just find yourself on the inside of an inside joke, or you may get a new nickname. But definitely know that you will have fun! Hope to see you all tomorrow. =)