Fun and Games at Christmas

Growing up we always had games at Christmas.  We played all kinds of games.  I use the term “game” loosely .  One of my favorite was a ping pong ball gun, my dad both got one.  These particular guns had an excellent twist, or should I say bend?  They could bend 90 degrees and had a little mirror mounted on the top.  You could look around a corner and shoot someone without exposing yourself to one of the high velocity ping pong projectiles.  Needless to say dad and I ambushed each other and the rest of our defenseless family members all day.  It was a legendary “game” from my childhood.  There was also the year that RISK came out, we played for 8 hours straight and there were still 3 of us left.  We had to call it a draw so we could eat something more than Apricot Delights and to head off a mutiny from the previously vanquished kin.  There were more things to play with!

I tell you this as background to my never ending quest to recreate that family experience I enjoyed in my youth.  Some years I am more successful than others.  This year we played a few good games including an old fashion card based game, the classic living room game – RockBand and 3 games played with phones/tablets.  One was a variation of charades, one was like the show “name that tune” and the third was called Spaceteam.  This is the one I want to tell you about.

Spaceteam is a free game that works on both Android and Apple.  Everyone downloads it to their phone or tablet (we were using tablets), you can have up to 4 players.  On each player’s screen are some spaceship controls and orders to manipulate the controls flash at the top of the screen.  To progress to the next level all the orders need to be carried out before time is up.  Simple right?  Here is the twist, the control that is specified in your order may or may not be on your screen.  If you can’t execute the order yourself you need to call it out so the person with that control on their screen knows what to do with it.  Of course others are doing the same thing, bark out orders while listening to the other players orders and scanning their controls.  AND the controls/settings can be very hard to say and very funny.  “Set the Gigithrusters to laundry mode!!!”  In the higher levels there aren’t even words, just symbols.  Interspersed with this bedlam, one operator might get the order that says everyone must shake their display or rotate it to avoid an asteroid or wormhole.

The competition may not have been as primal as the ping pong gun or have the staying power of a game of RISK, but it did have intensity and laughs that on more than one occasion brought tears to my eyes to go with my convulsions.  Which by the way, makes it very hard to see your nippleshield controls and set them to stun.  What’s the moral of this story?  Well, it’s that sometimes, just sometimes, things can be as good as you remembered and you might even be able to pass them on to somebody else.

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