Family Game Time.
James and I both have similar memories of playing against our card shark grandmothers… neither of which showed any mercy to their grandchildren. Me-momie would wipe the floor with us in Crazy Eights and I’m told Grammie Lani would crush James in Scrabble.
At our house, we’ve dabbled in games, however formal rules and the ability to hold a hand of cards has made it slow going. There was a time we were hot on Pengaloo. But it’s hard to keep track of all those wooden, rainbow penguin eggs.
Somehow we were gifted a deck of cards called Old Maid. And I let down over half of the world’s population when this appeared on our living room floor. Unfortunately, the Old Maid giggles were contagious. And Jake and Nate could actually play this game unassisted. I’ve done my best to thoughtfully provide contextual guidance as to the offensive name and sexist objective of this game as little boys scream and giggle and exclaim, “I don’t want the Old Maid, noooooooo! Not the Old Maid!” No one ever wants the old maid… some Google research has just uncovered a Kickstarter campaign for Bold Maid. I should probably redeem myself and invest.
And now we’ve graduated from the easiest game ever to this crazy complex, impossible game called Pokémon.
Pokémon is all the rage in first grade. Jake decided he liked it, but didn’t actually have any of the cards. He humored me when I would ask him if he was Pokey Mon in my best Jamaican accent as I poked him in the ribs and the belly button until I got a good, “Nooo, Mooooom.”
Now we’ve realized these cards make a decent, sugar-free reward for achieving good behavior milestones and so we’re now neck deep in this first grade Japanese phenomenon.
Here’s what I know: There are infinity Pokémon characters. They come on little baseball cards that you can trade and compare and long for. Each card has teeny tiny Barbie-sized writing that tells you all about the characters’ relative power. There are also Barbie-sized coins representing “damage.” It promotes a lot of adding and subtracting by tens. Our entire world revolves around damage and weakness and power and resistance. Some guys “evolve.” We only seem to have leaf, fist and eyeball energy, also known as grass, psychic and fighting energy. There are holographic coins to flip. And something called HP, which I’m guessing isn’t Hewlett Packard.
I’ve gathered that E.X. and Legendary are the best. I hear a lot about what cards Truman has. Truman is our seven-year-old Pokémon sensei. Skitty is cute. Her attack is a tail smack. Yesterday Nate and I were “knocked out” by Tangrowth’s mega mega drain. Which I much prefer to the horn drill, knuckle punch or beatdown. When Nate and I played against James and Jake, I remember being attacked by a lot of beatdown.
Jake and I started out by playing Pokémon kind of like War. We would each put a card down and then decide whose looked more powerful either by the numbers or the artwork or whether the character name was menacing, like Machop, or kind of cute like Horsea.
One night I thought I would read the directions and figure out how to play Pokémon for real. Twenty minutes with the directions and another twenty minutes on Youtube and I threw in the towel. I decided I’d never learn how to play. It appears to have been devised by the makers of american football and revered by little kids and those guys that like the World of Warcraft.
James has put in some time… likely watching some sort of secret Pokémon Sports Center, and now leads us all through battles each night. Tonight I actually heard myself say, “No, no. You can’t evolve Rhydon to Rhyhorn. Rhydon is a Stage 1 and Rhyhorn is a Basic. What are you even thinking?” I was quite proud of myself.
This morning Nate and I were at the breakfast table, as he leisurely examined the cross-country roadmap-sized instructions that are our lifeline to playing this hundred step game. He points to a picture of a cartoon human guy and says, “Mom, mom. Do you know who this is?”
“Um, no.”
“He’s a Pokémon Connoisseurus.”