Board Games

Nayo Carter wanted an alternative to another night of clubbing. She was tired of having to shout at her friends on the dance floor and needed a more relaxing way to spend a Wednesday night. So Carter dusted off her collection of about 20 board games and brought them to the New Haven Lounge one Wednesday earlier this month. The event, called Got Game? turned into a weekly gig. And the result is one of the best ways to spend a Wednesday, hands down. "It was something reminiscent of everybody's' childhood," Carter said.

Connie and Nancy and I have been best friends since the seventh grade, and when the three of us get together, it is middle school all over again. Card games and board games are part of our mix, and I am happy to report that while I am no better at these games than I was nearly 50 years ago, I am much more mature about losing. I think the wine helps. I have to say, nothing prepared me for life better than Park and Shop, a board game of competitive errand-running. Not even The Game of Life, with its kids and college funds and insurance policies, got me in shape for adulthood any better than Park and Shop.

In 1975, about 1,200 board game enthusiasts gathered at Johns Hopkins University to hold the first Origins board game convention.After much traveling around the country, the 17th Origins convention will return to Baltimore tomorrow, but this time as a four-day game extravaganza sprawled over the Convention Center and the Hyatt and Sheraton hotels.Organizers expect 6,000 to 8,000 people to attend seminars, scope out new products, socialize, but above all to play games. Lots of them. Thousands of games over the long weekend.

Nobody likes to be inconvenienced with power outages. Of course it is hard, but in a case like this you can't expect the power companies to fix everything immediately. It amazes me that they can clear up all those trees, debris and downed lines as quickly as they do. We should be glad if we only have the problem of no power and that our homes aren't completely destroyed. The Carr family ("Four days without juice, too much time spent in Panera," Sept. 1) should be glad they had a generator and not complain that it made it hard for their son to sleep.

In playing Sect: The Religious Party Game, the first person to land on enlightenment wins. Players face a choice of 500 questions on the world's religions, and creator Rick Weber of Mount Laurel, N.J., says it's fun. Yes, really. The General Electric salesman contends that there is a good time in sitting around a table and pondering who helped Jesus carry the cross or the number of times Muslims must pray during the day or that "West Bank" refers to the direction from which body of water.

Editor's Note: Jerdine Nolen shows how board games can also be good learning tools at home. Board games are a great way to combine family entertainment and learning. They often require critical thinking, strategy skills, prior knowledge and sometimes teamwork. They teach language, science, comprehension skills, answers to trivia questions, math facts and correct spelling. You don't have to shell out big bucks on fancy set-ups; all you need is a flat playing surface, a way to move game pieces and some imagination.

Adult board games can be ideal icebreakers or ways to further probe the psyches of those you already know and love. Granted, you may not love them so much after hearing them explain why they'd prefer to be caught picking their nose and eating it instead of wetting their pants in front of their co-workers, while playing Zobmondo!!Zobmondo!! -- in which contestants must choose one of two bizarre hypothetical situations and discuss why -- is one of the hot board games joining the ranks of such best-selling adult classics as Scattergories, Taboo and Pictionary, and old reliables like Monopoly and Scrabble.

Debbie Otto and her husband, Greg Mayer, are spending their summer vacation in Maryland the same way they have for the past decade. For five days, they'll stay inside a hotel, barely seeing daylight. Sleep will be forsaken. Long hours will be spent hunched over tables in windowless rooms, strategizing. The Inner Harbor will be missed once again. This is a holiday? For Otto and Mayer, the annual getaway is something they look forward to all year. The Missouri couple is among an estimated 1,000 to 1,500 people converging on the Marriott Hunt Valley Inn this week for the annual World Boardgaming Championships, which continue through tomorrow.

Charles Swann Roberts, an author and co-founder of publishing company Barnard, Roberts and Co. Inc. known for his extensive histories of the Pennsylvania Railroad, died Aug. 20 from complications of emphysema and pneumonia at St. Agnes Hospital. The Halethorpe resident was 80. Mr. Roberts was working in his Willow Avenue office in Halethorpe, which overlooks the former Pennsy mainline (now the Northeast Corridor) when he was stricken, said a daughter, Jean R. Schweitzer of Catonsville.

Monarch Avalon Inc., a Baltimore printing, game-making and publishing company, said yesterday that it has agreed to sell its Avalon Hill Game Co. division to Hasbro Inc. for $6 million in cash.As part of the deal, Monarch Avalon will change its name to Monarch Services Inc.The move, which is subject to shareholder approval, comes three months after Monarch Avalon reported a $1.73 million loss for its fiscal year that ended in April.For fiscal 1997, Monarch Avalon reported a profit of $180,000.

Charles Swann Roberts, an author and co-founder of publishing company Barnard, Roberts and Co. Inc. known for his extensive histories of the Pennsylvania Railroad, died Aug. 20 from complications of emphysema and pneumonia at St. Agnes Hospital. The Halethorpe resident was 80. Mr. Roberts was working in his Willow Avenue office in Halethorpe, which overlooks the former Pennsy mainline (now the Northeast Corridor) when he was stricken, said a daughter, Jean R. Schweitzer of Catonsville.

Pat Kennedy knew what was coming. There was just nothing he or his Towson team could do about it. Old Dominion rolled to an 86-56 victory against the Tigers in Saturday's Colonial Athletic Association quarterfinal, out-rebounding Towson by a single-game tournament record 33 boards. The Monarchs (24-8), the top seed and regular-season champions, had 60 rebounds, also a single-game tournament record, to the Tigers' 27 and outscored them 44-20 in the paint. "I saw them rebound early in the season against Georgetown.

At first, the Feeley family turned to board games - such a cozy, Norman Rockwell portrait of a snowed-in family. Mom and Dad vs. the girls, moving the pieces of Life, Sorry and Connect Four as snowflakes whirled outside their Parkton home. Eventually gamed out, they beeped and buzzed their way through electronic toys, popped in one movie after another, and then fidgeted in front of regular TV. Lauren, 11, and Shannon, 8, even resorted to books before someone started touching someone's stuff and someone went into someone's room, and pretty soon Mom had to institute the dread "No Touch Rule."

TAKOMA PARK -- Mary Feldman swore up and down before she moved into senior housing that she would never spend her time exclusively with older people. Stultifies one's thinking, Feldman, 87, said firmly on a recent evening before placing some tiles on a Scrabble board slowly filling up with the likes of retime and hover. So the motley crew of competitors joining her that night for Scrabble pleased her enormously. Around the table sat Evelyn Cameron, 63, Larry Ravitz, 56, and Julius Morgan, 12. On the surface, the foursome - a retired librarian, a semiretired real estate developer with three kids, a game enthusiast with a master's degree in medieval studies and a polite middle school student - don't have much in common.

What's the point? -- If you're looking for something to occupy your time for a few minutes or a few hours, addictinggames.com will do the job. The site is filled with games that hook players instantly, including puzzle and board games; sports, adventure, arcade, classic and strategy games. All games are free to play, and new games are added every week. What to look for --Check out the new games link to view the games featured for the current week and past weeks.

Nayo Carter wanted an alternative to another night of clubbing. She was tired of having to shout at her friends on the dance floor and needed a more relaxing way to spend a Wednesday night. So Carter dusted off her collection of about 20 board games and brought them to the New Haven Lounge one Wednesday earlier this month. The event, called Got Game? turned into a weekly gig. And the result is one of the best ways to spend a Wednesday, hands down. "It was something reminiscent of everybody's' childhood," Carter said.

As she glances surreptitiously to her left, Rebecca Hebner attempts to devise a winning strategy in this three-player contest of Tyranno Ex: A Game of Evolution. Her two opponents, Robert Eastman of Las Vegas and Wendy DeMarco of Cinaminson, N.J., sense the unshakable confidence of the 14-year-old Colorado gaming champion in their midst. Rebecca claims modestly that Tyranno Ex is not the one she plays best and does not foresee reaching the semifinals in the tournament for this particular game, which challenges each player to create a favorable natural environment for his dinosaur.

The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board & Table Games, by Margaret K. Hofer. Princeton Architectural Press. 159 pages. $24.95. An orgy of ludic nostalgia, this presentation of the best of the New York Historical Society's accumulation of board games is spectacular in appearance and provocative in content. It is essentially an extended, celebratory catalog of the collection of Ellen and Arthur Liman, which they began accumulating in earnest in 1980 and bequeathed to the society in 2000.

The most widely used exercise in game theory, the field that drew the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences this year, has nothing to do with economics. It's called the "prisoner's dilemma" and examines the choices of two criminals to stay mum or confess and implicate their cohort. The dilemma is a favorite teaching tool of Thomas C. Schelling, a professor at the University of Maryland who won the Nobel yesterday. The prize committee bestowed the honor on Schelling and Israeli-American Robert J. Aumann for their research on game theory.