My grandmother was competitive. If you went to visit Grandma, it was only a matter of time before she asked if you wanted to play a game. Skipbo, RummyCube, Trianamos, Phase 10 and Rook were all good possibilities. If she was losing, she’d pray. She’d win. I think that might be cheating.
I take after my grandma. With the praying and the competition. I only cheat in Monopoly. That game is mind numbingly boring. I always tell people I cheat before I agree to play. Somewhere in the middle of the game they notice that I’ve pilfered half of the funds in the bank and have been charging them rent when they land on their own properties. They always act surprised. Not sure why though since I warned them upfront.
Currently, I’m caught up in a fierce competition with my mother. I showed her how to play Word with Friends on her phone. When you finish a game on WWF it asks if you’d like a rematch. Problem is that it asks you both. We’re both fairly competitive. If I lose a game, I’m certainly not going to deny a rematch. It’s a shot to earn back some vocabulary credibility. If I win, its fun to keep riding that wave. As a result, we are experiencing exponential growth in the number of games we’re playing against each other.
The two of us have different approaches to Word with Friends. My mom looks at the letters she has and thinks. Then she puts words on the board. I try that. When it doesn’t work, I start randomly arranging letters until the game accepts a word. Sometimes I’m shocked. My mother is not impressed. If she ran the world, you’d have to use the word in a sentence before you could place it on the board. I have to admit that it does slightly decrease the impact of a win when I sneak in a higher score with a word I have no idea how to pronounce or define.
Bovids are not known to daven. If they did, Ods might decided to rearrange the var. There you go, my mama. All my words in sentences. I even looked them up. Grandma would be proud.