Game Night

I think it's fitting that our first official blog post be about something that we did that was very fun for both of us. For our Friday night date, Stephen arranged what he likes to call the "Haskin Family Game Tournament 2008." He created a computer program on his old high-school graphing calculator (perhaps high-school algebra is actually useful for something...) that showed the games that we were going to play, as well as what order we would play them in (this was randomly determined by the calculator...see video below).

The awards for the tournament were to be as follows:
First Game: The winner of the first game got to pick the dessert for the evening.
Second Game: The loser of the second game would have to make it.
Third Game: The loser of the third game would have to clean it up.


The first game was Speed Monopoly (Monopoly using the new Speed Dice, which makes the game go faster and easier). Although Heather played hard and strong, and her entrepreneurial skills were pushed to their limit, Stephen's acquisition of Park Place early in the game led to her ultimate demise (two turns in a row of a $1200 fine is hard for anybody to take...). At the end of the game, Stephen had 10 hotels plus a ton of money and Heather had $1.

Then we went to Arctic Circle (the first time eating out in about 1.5 months...let's face it: we're poor!). The burgers and shakes were fantastic...a good way to celebrate a victory (or mourn a loss...however you want to look at it).

Next was Quick Scrabble. It's actually a little easier to come up with good words if you have 9 tiles instead of 7. Some examples of words: jade (twice using the same j), goiter, fauna, qat (it's a real word!), & navel. Eventually, Heather pulled ahead at the last moment, winning by a 4-point margin (237 to 233). You try winning with a set of letters like the picture at the right.

Unfortunately, because we are lame married people, we were starting to get really tired at this point (10:30). So we decided to call it quits.

Because I (Stephen) was the loser of the 2nd game, I did the dishes on Saturday morning. Unfortunately, we never got to play Nitro Kart (a really lame racing game for Playstation 2).

Thus ended the Haskin Family Game Tournament 2008.