I'm game...

In my ongoing quest to find things our family can enjoy together when it's raining (which is pretty much constant this winter) I decided to invest in a new version of Trivial Pursuit today. Well, my goal was to buy two versions - one for the kids, one for the adults. The adult version that we have is ten years old and is American, so it's full of questions about presidents, the civil war, and baseball.

Today I discovered that though there are frequent updates to the kids' edition of TP, you can't buy "just" Trivial Pursuit any more. There are enough choices of specialty Trivial Pursuit games to confound and overwhelm even the most savvy purchaser of board games - Lord of the Rings edition, Lord of the Rings DVD edition, Star Wars DVD edition, Book Lovers' edition, The 90's edition... and they all have gimmicky gameplay tokens and nowhere near enough question cards. Dammit, I just want a Trivial Pursuit game that is reasonably challenging, but not impossible for me to do well at, and that has little pies for me to fill up.

Because I couldn't find what I wanted, I went a little nuts trying to fill the void in my life by purchasing many other games. A few weeks back, Megan and I found a game/calendar/Xmas ornament temporary store in the hellish mall near our home and we decided to go back there. It turned out that the store is closing tomorrow and all games were 50% off. I managed to snag the last copy of the Deluxe Scrabble. This is something I have coveted for years, and even at 50% off it was a hefty investment... but ultimately I decided I had to have it, because Scrabble is Jeff's and my favourite leisure activity and we have just about had it with the tiles sliding all over the board on our el-cheapo version of the game, purchased when we first got married.

So, my quest for a good "normal" Trivial Pursuit game continues, but we are now the happy owners of a beautiful new Scrabble board, with a turntable, lovely cherry wood tiles and a timer for those "speed Scrabble" games. I guarded that last game box as I browsed through the store (picking up Cranium Family Fun edition, a card game version of Clue, and an I Spy memory game), and when I brought it up to the counter I found myself caressing the box while my order was rung up. "I've wanted one of these for years," I told the man behind the counter, who no doubt couldn't have cared less, but politely echoed my enthusiasm about getting such a good deal on it.