The History of Games

I have always been a “gaming” girl since a very, very young age. Having a big brother, who’s five years older and was into everything and anything that involves using the brain (or a quick eye-hand reflex), influenced how I grew up big time. I’m sure he’d have loved to have a brother of similar age to compete against, but since he didn’t have one, a little sister five years younger would do too. What he didn’t realize was, when he lost (which happened a lot), it was just a tad more embarrassing.

Below is my “history of games”. I try to put up as complete a list as possible, to pay tribute to not only my childhood, but also my present, my continuing, though only occasional, fascination with new games and mind practices.

Childhood -> Adulthood:

• Nintendo (Super Mario, Contra, Bomberman, Tank City, Road Runners, Pac Man, Duck Hunt, various shooting games, arcade games, and tons of others)
• Chinese chess
• Chess
• Chinese checkers (跳棋)
• Go (围棋)
• 军棋，四国军棋
• 飞行棋(I think the English name of this game is called “Sorry!”)
• Connect Five(五子棋), Connect Four(四子棋), TicTac
• Various Chinese Card games (升级，争上游，捉黑叉，五十K，说瞎话，拉大车，翻对儿，51点，拱猪(Hearts), Tractor, and many others I don’t remember names for)
• Bridge
• Mahjong, of course
• Computer games (大富翁一二三代，Tronic, Pinball, Tetris, 3-D Tetris, 决战俄罗斯, Vikings, the Carnegie game(卡耐基人生指南), Sim, the Pipe connecting game, Freecell, Minesweeper, and many whose names are lost)

Games I learned/played after I came to the U.S. (most of them I now own):

• Skip-Bo
• Sequence
• Scattergory
• Scrable
• Pictionary
• Taboo
• 4 corners
• Uno
• Spite and Malice
• Sudoku
• Bejeweled, Bubbles, and many other variations of this type
• all the card games in Hoyle Card Games (Gin, Cribbage, Rummy, Pinochle, Solitaire, to name a few)
• all the board games in Hoyle Board Games (Backgammon, Mancala, Othello, Yahtzee…)
• all the casino games in Hoyle Casino Games
• all the word games in Hoyle Word Games (Anagrams, Enigma, DoubleCross, Word Yacht…)
• Super Nintendo/Nintendo 64 games (Dr Mario, Pokemon Puzzle League are my favorites)
• lots of PlayStation 2 games (Dead or Alive!)
• Wii (Wii Sports, Paper Mario, Wario, Wii Play, Legend of Zelda)

Now:

• all those stupid Facebook games I played lately :)
• Texas Hold’em Poker

Update on Jan 31, 2009:

I must add another two (newly learned and thoroughly fun) here: Carcassonne and 够级.