The Games People Play...

Those of you who have followed my previous blog already know I am a token fiend and by that I mean I go crazy trying to win Regent tokens which can be exchanged later in the cruise for logo geegaws.  Regent has now replaced the tokens with a "reward card" which is a plastic coated, color coded sort of playing card sized item showing either 1, 2 or even 3 points.  The gist is the same:  you win a game, you win a reward point.  The difference is that some of the games now have 1st and 2nd place prizes (hence 1 point, 2 points, 3 points). 

Anyway, I was intent on winning some of these point cards.  I just didn't realize it was going to be so difficult to do so!  At the end of the two weeks I had amassed a few more points than my good friend Susan had...her face in this picture is priceless!



While I give proper credit (and deservedly so) to the wonderful performers while they are on stage, putting them in charge of some of these games has been less than effective.  Mason, for example, is a wonderfully talented dancer but he has been letting a couple of the passengers turn the games into a mitigated disaster.  Bocce was such a joke that we skipped all of the rest of the games that day and hadn't tried anything else since.  Today we participated in the putting contest but, again, there is a group of game players who just aren't any fun to be around.  I don't know any nicer way to say it.  The passengers who ARE fun to play games with are a lot of fun, indeed.  Mike got kind of a "rep" around the ship as the guy who brought his own Ping putter with him while everyone else has to use the rusty ones from 1972.  Also, funny is when someone overheard someone else talking about Mike's putter and thought it was a PINK putter which resulted in an additional conversation about why some guy would have a pink putter.  There were a couple of guys (Mike, Wayne, Paul, Jim(?)) who put together some putting skins games a few times....Mike won $38 one day but the rest of the time they all pretty much broke even.

Luckily, the daily tea time trivia contest still awards reward points to the winners. We have a team that we felt would be very strong (or at least should have been!) and we have fun, and even though my "officially fluid" team of 3 to 6 players never claimed a victory, I have a few CC friends who are super smart/well rounded and they have donated some of their points to me as you can see above (Much love to Jackie, Dennis, Dick, Peter and Pat) I finally remembered to bring my camera one day and present here are Bonnie, Joel, Kathy, Me and I believe that seafoam green shape in the bottom left is Susan whose head is chopped out of the picture

One game that I AM good at, apparently is bingo!  One day I won the $185 cover all and

twice I won the small round robin --once for $80 and once for $139!  We only play bingo on sea days, but I still have a few more chances to win some money.  Which is especially good because the casino games are kicking my ass.  The "ice-breaker" for Bingo winnings was Wayne who won two out of four games one day; next day Joel won and was kind enough to pose for a picture!

Here's one last thing regarding games which really aggravated me (although I have noticed more of this on this cruise than I did previously)  tonight was the Liar's Club game show which is another event you need to form teams for.  My friends who had planned to play unfortunately had disbursed -- two turned into sleeping beauties (LOL you know who you are!); two wouldn't leave the casino tables (again, not mentioning any names!) and Bonnie & Joel have managed to avoid me all day....(on purpose?? methinks NOT!).  So I went into Horizon in search of a team.  Important note before I go further -- there is NO LIMIT on the # of people you can have on your team.  This policy was announced a few times by the host/cruise director.  I already knew this and on my last cruise, I made a point of looking around us to see if anyone was alone and invited them to join our team.  Okay, so getting back to tonight's game.  I spotted Ed and Anna who were sitting with a 3rd woman.  I joined them and introduced myself to the 3rd woman who said her name was Barbara.  At that point Anna told her her own name and introduced Ed.  I didn't realize that they all didn't already know each other -- but no biggie, like I said it's a friendly game and anyone can & should join anyone else.  Now here's the part where I got aggravated.  About a minute before the game started, Barbara's two other friends came in to the Lounge and instead of having them join us, B slides her chair away without even a goodbye and shouts to the cruise director "Can we get our own team #?"  What the hell??? 

But this is the kind of cliquishness (is that even a word?) I am finding around the ship that I didn't find the last time.  Last time the people who did the same kinds of things, were all very sociable (at least amongst each other) and I kind of assumed that was because we all knew we were going to be seeing a lot of each other.  The smokers all chatted and socialized with each other;  the game players all chatted and socialized with each other; the casino players all chatted and socialized with each other.... you get the picture.  I'm sure it was the same way in the gym, in the puzzle corner, in the card room, etc.
THIS time I am finding a lot of "pockets" of people congregating in smaller groups and keeping to themselves to the extent where they don't even acknowledge others in passing.  Weird!