Horstmania: A Game-Playing Nation

Oh, is it ever! If you are not familiar with the quirkiness of my family, we call ourselves ‘Horstmania’ instead of the much more boring ‘Horstman family’. And if you don’t know that we border on obsession with games, then you don’t know my family at all, and might be reading the wrong blog! We are known for spending days going from game to game with amazing stamina. As soon as we grow tired of one game, someone asks, ‘So, what’s the next activity?’ and we are off again!

I’ve felt a bit deprived this year, as there have only been a few days or nights that we have convinced people to play games with us, and they were not all rousing successes. You may have heard us bemoaning our attempt to play Apples to Apples (can you believe they didn’t know who Lucille Ball is?) or heard the story of ‘the penny game,’ which is a bit too PG-13 for this blog.

Thankfully, six weeks with Aidan will put that right in a hurry! Friends in England would ask, ‘What are you doing tonight?’ and the answer was almost always the same: Games! Our favorites included:

• Pub quizzes – We’ve already posted some of our favourite questions from this, but it’s worth noting the sheer volume of pub quizzes we completed: over 240! We did quizzes all over Birmingham and Paris. We even became known at several coffee shops, where they would start making our drinks as soon as we walked in, and ask, ‘Do you have that book with you again?’ Man, are we crazy!
• Reverse Apples to Apples – this is a Horstmanian specialty, taking the roughly 500 ‘noun’ cards through multiple elimination rounds to find our favourite. There’s no good way to explain it, other than to say it is intense!
• Online quizzes and crosswords – Aidan and I would spend hours on these.
• And of course, 1950’s Wii! Buddy brought his Wii with him, and we had a blast trying it out, but unfortunately the video wouldn’t read completely correctly, so it was in black and white the whole time. At the beginning it really threw us off, but now I’m convinced that Wii’s were never meant to be played in color.

With Meggy and Andrew here, the games just continue! We spent both Sunday and Monday night sitting around playing cards, which becomes more and more fun as Andrew becomes more and more ridiculous.

It IS making me question our hosting skills, however, as in the middle of a game Andrew said, ‘This is just like camping!’ We clearly need to show them a better time – they can’t have flown all the way to England to do the same things we would do if we were sitting in the woods of Ohio!