Emerson's card

Last night our friends Jamaica, Nelson, Sarah and Rob came over to supervise my turning 32. The celebration in my honor included pizza, wine and a rousing round of a board game called Apples to Apples.

In this game each person is dealt a hand of seven "noun cards" - these can be literally anything from socks to Oprah Winfrey to the 1812 Overture - to play through the course of the game. Each round starts with the round leader drawing a green "adjective" card from the pile (hopeless, joyous, spooky, ridiculous, shallow, etc) and then each person picks the card from their hand that best represents that adjective and plays it anonymously. The leader picks the card that they like best and that person gets the green card.

To win, the key is to play the card that you think the person choosing the card will choose as the best - which may not necessarily be the most literal interpretation. The person who gets six green cards first wins the game.

We added in a special twist to the way that we played on Thursday: in each round, Eric picked a random noun card from the pile and played it with the others. This was "Emerson's card." We were curious to see how Emerson (a random card) was going to do in this game against our hand-selected plays.

He almost won.

Sometimes it was because his answers were irresistably ironic (Socks for Pathetic); other times they were eerily spot-on (John Philip Sousa for Patriotic). Of the twenty or so rounds we played, he got four cards before I got to six and won. (It was my birthday, after all.)

The other weird thing that happened was the adjective card "Shiny" kept surfacing as the card to play next. Each time, the person who drew it would stick it back in the deck and then suddenly the next person would draw "Shiny" again. Cree-py!

And now I am 32 years old.