humiliation
God bless you, debt industry!
Round about Christmastime, we had a large number of rewards points on our Amex card. (Just shows how deeply in debt we are.)
Mer wanted shoes, and I of course wanted all the eurogames I could get my little grubby paws on. We split up the points, and I got a couple of 2-player games: Odin's Ravens and Jambo.
Turns out Mer's chosen pair of shoes wasn't available, so she just applied the points back to our next bill. That's fair, isn't it?
Anyway, recently we set about learning Jambo, with its theme of pre-colonial African market stalls. And this is where karma caught up with me.
You see, back when Mer was pregnant with L, she was on bed rest -- which made every day sort of a challenge to find interesting entertainment. Out of desperation, and disgust with the TV, we turned to a couple of shrinkwrapped board games given to us as wedding presents, from old college buddies of mine. (And holy crap, are they brilliant and wonderful people. Their blog is password-protected. Bah.) These games sat unmolested in our closet for over a year, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and we opened the first one, which looked like something simple about archaeological expeditions or some shit. That game ended up saving us -- we played game, after game, after game.
And Mer ended up humiliating me at it, time after time.
Jambo is a return to that time -- where no matter what I do, I always lose in the end. It's been 7 or 8 games of it now, and each time is an exercise in how Mer can very much buy and sell my ass 6 times before dinner. (I suppose the first warning signs should have been that we picked up on 99% of the rules on the first try, as well as the satanic glow Mer gets in her eyes when she sells a lot of goods at once.) This is irksome because it's a great game too -- you gotta plan ahead to get the right kinds of merchandise on your market stall, and play the right cards in sequence to get the highest price for what you have, and be able to mess with your opponent's plans. (My preferred strategies are the most annoying to Mer: corner the market on a certain good, or steal the good she needs from her market stall. These, so far, have not worked.)
What's most humiliating is that after the 6th straight loss, I was dumb enough to place a wager: loser feeds the baby the next morning.
So as I sit here in my underwear, formula stains on the floor, Mer's victory song replaying in my head, I'm reflecting on how like a moth to the flame I am. At least I'm not dumb enough to wager on games of Jambo again. Well, maybe not anytime soon, anyway.