Nerdiness and Game-playing

My family has reached a new level of nerdiness lately.

And for us, that's saying something.

Lately we have been playing a lot of “Settlers of Catan”, a board game that involves collecting resources and using them to build settlements and cities and roads. You collect different resources depending on the dice roll, so of course, getting the optimal numbers is important. That means we, of course, are interested in knowing which numbers actually get rolled the most. Dad was convinced the conventional dice would be skewed somehow, so he downloaded a dice ap on his phone and started introducing it to our games, convinced it would be much more accurate. Plus they are efficient and easy-- less noisy, less prone to mess up the game pieces or roll off the table. At first we were a bit dubious, but over time all four of us have succumbed at least somewhat to the electronic dice. I have been won over entirely and would prefer never to go back to conventional dice again :-).

But, despite agreeing to use the electronic dice, James was more dubious about their accuracy and decided to keep track of the numbers and compare them. Mom still sometimes prefers the regular dice, and when my brother and sister-in-law come over, despite being nerdy in other ways, refuse to use the electronic dice. So over time James was able to compile quite a few stats on both devices, by keeping track of every dice roll on both. It was my sister-in-law Ginny who suggested compiling all the data into an excel spreadsheet. The results were surprising. Ideally each device should form a perfect bell-curve, but none of them are quite perfect. Ironically, the “real” dice have been more bell-curvy than the phone. Fours have been rolled more than fives, which is odd, and sixes and eights have been rolled more than sevens, also odd. (Seven is supposed to be the most rolled number; it is associated with the “robber” who steals a resource when seven is rolled.) As we were standing around the table looking at the charts and analyzing the data, James looked up and asked, “Do other families do this, or just us?”

I had to laugh at that. Our tradition of nerdiness in games goes back a long way. My sister-in-law Ginny kept data on games of Nertz for a long time, and compiled them into charts of wins and losses, also average points per game and “percent nertzed.” She fits right in with our family. :-)

My family has played games together as long as I remember, and it is something I will always be grateful for. I learned to ad and subtract figures quickly in my head when I became the designated scorekeeper at an early age. From a dice game called Muggins I learned how six and four ad up to make ten, and from a card game called Cribbage I learned that seven plus eight is fifteen, and so is six and nine.  

And then there's Scrabble. We used to be pretty normal as far as Scrabble goes, then my dad took it up a notch. He started playing these weird, crazy words we'd never heard of before. In answer to the protest, “That's not a word!” He would say calmly, “Look it up.” We would-- and it was. I am a very competitive person, so this was to me the proverbial throwing down of the gauntlet. I began studying the Scrabble Dictionary in my free time, and picked up all kinds of useful things. Handy, short Z words, Q-without-a-U words (yes, they do exist!) Dad and I memorized the two-letter word list (all 96 of them) and studied the J and K sections of the dictionary. Our turns grew longer because we were no longer satisfied having a double-word score alone, but we just had to put our H or M on the double-letter score, as well! And then-- we found Super Scrabble.

Super Scrabble has become one of our favorite all-time games. It has twice as many letters as regular Scrabble, and a board that is three rows larger in all directions. There are now quadruple letter and quadruple word spaces. We play with nine tiles because it takes so long otherwise-- and even with seven it is rarely less than three hours to play each game. Often closer to four.

We once played Scrabble with a friend who was visiting and he happened to get the Q and not have a U.  "No problem," Dad and I said, "there's lots of  Q words that don't use U."

"No there isn't," our friend asserted.

"Yes there are," we replied, pulling out our lists and the dictionary to show him.  We were very happy when the fourth edition of the Scrabble Dictionary came out with "Qi".  Before that "Qat" was the best.  "Tranq", "qwerty", and "qaid" and "qoph" are also very handy.

Our friend just looked at us, shaking his head.  "You guys are sick."

That was the first but not the last time this epitaph has been bestowed on us...