Backgammon VS Checkers

Tonight we were waiting for Ricky and Lucy to show up so Ward started playing internet Backgammon. I told him I had only played once when I was babysitting a four year old boy named Avery. He tried to teach me but I never got the hang of it. So Ward learned how to play in about fifteen minutes and decided to show me. We played 2 games and I won them both. Then he decided we should play checkers.

We love board games. We love Quelf, Balderdash, Settlers of Catan, Cranium, Catchphrase, and Risk just to name half a dozen. We usually like to play in larger groups but tonight it was just the two of us so we settled on two player games. So we played Checkers. The first game had to be thrown out because neither of us could move a piece. Then we played four games, I lost every one of them.

I don’t think I like Checkers very much.

So we went back to Backgammon and Ward won the next two games because I was still so flustered about Checkers. Finally, I regained my composure and won the fifth and final game.

I am now the Backgammon champ in our household (at least until tomorrow when Ward reads this post and demands a rematch).

The funny thing is that in the 1970’s a friend of my parents made a Backgammon/coffee table for them. When I was growing up it was always in our TV room or their bedroom. When my mom left and we sold my childhood home my dad was going to throw out the old Backgammon table but I asked if I could have it. He said he didn’t care.

Flash forward a few years. Ward and I are going to get married. He decided to take that table and refinish the entire thing and make me new Backgammon pieces. He also made me a homemade Mancala board for our Wedding gift. At the time I was the Mancala champ in our house and it was a very sweet gift complete with my future name engraved on the back. Anyways he refinished the backgammon table and we put a piece of glass on it. We continued to use it as our coffee table (despite the table looking like a piece of 1972 furniture).

Then in our last house I broke the glass top. So I put the pieces away (which means I lost them). When we moved here we kept the table and it is in our bedroom. But we have NEVER used it to play Backgammon because we had NEVER taken the fifteen minutes to learn how to play.

Now that I am the new Backgammon champ of our household I am going to refresh my search for those missing pieces and maybe start up some Backgammon championships complete with registration forms and application fees.

Oh, and I am NEVER playing Checkers again.

-june