Time to Settle

Last Sunday we hosted some boys from Henry's school at a "Settlers of Catan" party. If you don't know the game, and you happen to have a boy or two laying around, it's a dickering, bartering, colonizing contest especially designed with this age group in mind. It's basically medieval monopoly/risk without three bazillion hours of seemingly never ending game time. For what it's worth, neither Monopoly nor /Risk come to mind when I am thinking of a board game to play. That is unless I am stuck on a deserted island with 8 years of endless boredom on the horizon before any hope of rescue arrives. Even then I think I might create my own game out of dead crabs and coconut shells.

Much fun was had. There was plenty of land conquering, resource bartering and, of course, eating. We had to take a break about every thirty minutes to feed the players. They ate three large bag of Chex Mix in roughly the same manner as piranhas eat convicted pirates trapped in a cage in an old horror flick. Eight boys can devour that stuff like locus on a feeding frenzy across the great plains. It's awe inspiring.

The whole group of 5th graders....

Henry questions the position of the die marker...

Josh and Tyler try to come to an agreement to trade resources while Jack lends his two cents to the economics of the deal. Wheat for bricks? I wouldn't do it if I were you ...

Chaya smiling in the way that only folks who have the upper hand in the deal can...

Sam waxing philosophic on the pros and cons of port control. He obviously had one already.

And as an interesting side note - we recently discovered that, while we knew that Henry and Chaya were both from Cambodia, they were in the same orphanage at the same time! What are the odds of two little babies in an orphanage outside of Phnom Penh, adopted by two families who lived a continent apart, would end up in the same Elementary School in SF? Yet, here they are. And great friends to boot. Amazing.