Partying with the kids

In four days I will be going Back To The Lounge.  Every year on Good Friday I invite everyone from my gamer group at the University of Waterloo to come back to the Comfy Lounge and play games for a day and that time is once again upon us.

You should come join us!  Comfy Lounge, Math and Computers building, UWaterloo campus, 11 to 11.  Do it.

Originally it was all a bunch of recently graduated gamers but now a significant number of the people coming are kids.  Lots of the Comfy crowd have spawned rugrats or otherwise acquired them and they like games too, it turns out.  Up until this point I have always left Pinkie Pie with the inlaws because we wanted to party hard and not spend our day following a toddler about.

But now Pinkie Pie is plenty old enough to play games for hours and really enjoys them, so this year she is going to come Back To The Lounge with us.

I have invited people to join me at the party before who weren't part of the original crew but it never worked out.  The trouble was that I wasn't willing to commit to spending a day with someone at the event - I wanted to go to the event, and I was happy if they wanted to attend too.  But I am going to randomly end up in a three hour game of money Bu, and I won't be quitting early.  I am going to want to reconnect with people I only see once a year, and even some I see less often than that.  It isn't exactly a great invite "Hey, want to come to a party with me, where I will largely speaking ignore you?"  I love the idea of inviting people but I want to spend a day in hedonistic delight with no responsibilities.  Those invites probably sounded as messy as they were.

But this time I am bringing Pinkie Pie.  She will want to play games with me no doubt but I think she will also be happy playing games with lots of other people, and at worst we can park her in a corner with an ipad or a kobo and let her do her thing by herself for awhile.  We had a trial run this past weekend when I had a board game night and she played many games of Santorini in a row and was eager for more so I have some degree of optimism that she will enjoy the event without dragging us down any.

So now it is time to pass on my tradition to the next generation.  The tradition of going to a smelly old lounge with crappy furniture to play games all day, once a year.  It is so random, as traditions tend to be, I suppose, till they are around long enough that people forget why they started and just continue to go through the motions.  Then they are just a part of life, not something strange.

Foooourth!