Are you going to share the Boggle stories?
When my wife and I first got together we discovered that we shared a love of word games. And since we were spending all our time together by choice anyway, we played games a lot.
I had never played Boggle, but she was a big fan. So we played Boggle. And played Boggle. And played Boggle. To this day, I associate Boggle-playing with romance, which is kind of weird, I suspect.
My wife is also wicked smart and competitive, and it turns out that she is those things in a particular way that makes her very good at Boggle. I’m not stupid (or wasn’t yet; it took the having of children and the passage of time for me to become both uncool and subnormal in intelligence), but I’m just a step slower than she is when it comes to the particular set of skills required to succeed at Boggle. But I was just a little worse at Boggle than she was (or else she was engaged in a sustained and impressive act of deception by always staying, rabbit-like, just one jump ahead of my straining, snapping, racing-greyhound jaws).
Pretty sure, though, that she was just better. Though just a little.
So I kept trying, and she was game to keep playing (because she almost always won, but I was close enough to keep it exciting). And over a period of many weeks (months, maybe? it was a long time, anyway) both of us steadily improved our Boggle play.
She was amazing at being able to see the board and systematically cover it in its entirety in the span of one egg-timer-interval, getting Every. Single. Word. And try as I might, I couldn’t see them as fast as she could.
If the board happened to be a stingy one, with few words, I could usually manage to get all the words myself, and fight her to a draw. And if it was one of those glorious boards with lots of words, and big words, I had a chance to actually beat her, because getting really long words was the one area where I was just a little better than she was. But most of the time the board was somewhere in the middle, and she was better. Just a little better. But enough.
When Big Boggle, with the 5×5 grid, came into our lives, it was kind of awesome, because it shifted things slightly but noticeably in my direction. She still won the majority of our Big Boggle matches, but I was more competitive, because there were more long words available for me to get.
We played hundreds and hundreds of Boggle and Big Boggle games (where “game” was usually as many rounds as it took for one of us to reach a score of 100, which took longer and longer as we got better, since it became more common for each of us to get all the words available, canceling each other out and only scoring a small number of points per round).
Because we were only playing with each other, and because she always retained that small but persistent edge that both encouraged me to improve but frustrated me by her continually improving by the same amount, we weren’t really aware (or at least, I wasn’t really aware) how much better at the game we’d become. But then one night her brother and sister were over, and we had a game night, and at one point we tired of Monopoly or card games or whatever else we’d been playing and tried 4-way Boggle.
For the next 30 minutes bro- and sis-in-law scored exactly zero (0) points, while Linda and I had our usual tooth-and-nail battle (which she, of course, eventually won). Because neither of them ever got a single word that Linda and I had not also recorded.
“Maybe we should play a different game,” was the diplomatic suggestion they made when the game finally, mercifully, ended.
And that’s my Boggle story.
Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/70532423354.
