Got Your Game Face On? - by Natalie Anderson

pic by Salvatore Vuono
 http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

It's the school holidays again here in New Zealand and Autumn has kicked in with a vengeance. In fact, it feels colder than winter at the moment! As an attempt to keep the kids entertained, I've hauled out the board games. I've been playing Snakes & Ladders with the four year old twins (they have a tendency to ignore the snakes altogether) and I've been playing some Candyland too - also Bingo and Monopoly with the older two.

But my favourite board game is perhaps the most famous board game of all - Chess - the game of kings. I love the challenge of it - the strategy, the thinking ahead... By the way, I'm absolutely hopeless at it, but that's beside the point! I pit my wits against my six year old and he wins every time (ok, I might maybe let him) ... but I like that you can have a game go on for ages and (because as I've already confessed, I'm pretty useless) have no idea how I'm going to get him...

I think chess has a mixed image in public perception - there's that whole genius geek angle (so not us) but I once read a newspaper brief about a love triangle at an international chess tournament - two young men came to fisticuffs at a nightclub after the day's play over one of the female players... that story made me smile and frankly is perfect fodder for the romance writer - I love that those 'geeks' were getting on down at a nightclub and letting emotions overrule any Spock-like tendencies they might stereotypically be supposed to have!!!

And chess frequently features in the flicks - the ultimate hero, Humphrey Bogart,  plays chess in Casablanca. It's in sci-fi movies (2001 A Space Odessey); kid's flicks (Aladdin; The Addams Family; Harry Potter), comedies (Ace Ventura Pet Detective - which also has a great example of a continuity error involving the chess board!), and of course, there are all those movies about chess and players themselves (like Searching for Bobby Fischer). But the best chess scenes to my way of thinking (that would be the romance writer way) in flicks are those sensual ones - the most famous one in the original Thomas Crown Affair featuring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway... but then Austin Powers spoofs this when he plays Russian model 'Ivana Humpalot'...

But I digress, because here we are, the kids and I curled up in front of the fire, surrounded by boxes and boards... filling in the hours while the wind and rain rattle the windows. I must admit it's very pleasant until one of the elder ones starts screeching because one of the four year olds has ignored the snake she just landed on again... and that's when I being to wonder about expanding our collection...


So here's my question for you today - do you have some hands-down favourite family board games that everybody loves to play? Share with me now and I'll random pick one commenter to win signed copies of my releases this month - in the US it is WALK ON THE WILD SIDE while in the UK THE END OF FAKING IT and may I say that in both books, there are some games played!!!!

EDITED TO ADD: the random prize has been drawn!!! Kristina Knight - can you please email me your snail mail address - to natalie (at) natalie-anderson (dot) com and I can get the books in the post to you! Thanks so much to everyone for stopping by to swap fave games today :)

And to keep up to date with my news, more giveaways (and random chess result reporting) be sure to connect with me on my Facebook page :)