Category: Games

Pinball at the grocery store

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Games3 Comments

If you like organic foods, you probably shop at MOM’s Organic Market if there’s one in your area. They’ve been around since 1987, so they know what they’re doing.

However, if you live in or near College Park, Maryland, you have a special treat if you like real pinball machines–as opposed to the rather flat and phony versions on line.

MOM’s founder Scott Nash loves pinball. So when he opened up the College Park store (his 19th location at the time) he created a special room for 25 of his mint condition 1970s/1980s pinball machines. Hint: it’s on the left side of the store past the easy chair room. Most of the games cost 50₵, though a few are 25₵.

In the area to visit my daughter and granddaughters, my wife and I went to the store and went through $10 worth of quarters in a few minutes. (They have a change machine.) And, we were happy to see that the grandchildren are learning what quality entertainment is all aboutwhile eating good food.

There are leagues and the site also has a Facebook page.

We had a very enjoyable trip and a great Thanksgiving with family after missing seeing them last year due to COVID.

—Malcolm

As an old time journalist, my alter ego Jock Stewart loves pinball almost as much as he loves puns an making fun of the bad people in government,

 

 

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Blank sheets of paper made us happy for hours

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Games, writing

Our father had tons of ditto and mimeographed sheets of paper that had been used on one side that he recyled, from the office and brought home to my two brothers and me.

When he was young, he invented and/or  his father invented two used-paper games that were perfect for people with a lot of imagination. Both games began on multiple sheets with paper stapled or taped together so that they formed a large square or rectangle. When the played Colonies, we drew the outline of a large island on the resulting huge sheet of paper and then lined if off in a cross-hatch pattern on one-inch squares.

Crayons and colored pencils made our games works of art.

We took terns claiming squares which, of course, were our cologies. You had to claim each new square in a block that was continguous to a square you already had. Once territories began to develop, we added railroads, ports, towns, lakes, roads, mountains, and other features.

A stimilar game was called Town. Instead of drawing an island, we drew a crossroads in the center ot the giant sheet of taped-together paper. Those represented the Town’s major highways. Then we preceded to add smaller streets, schools, homes, factories, parks, offices and other features. Inevitably, each of us would use a section to present the bad part of town, filling it with narrow and wisted streets with bars, shady warehouses, and hotels that were obvously houses of ill repute. Whenever a section got too horrible, we’d do urban renewal projects which simply consisted of slapping a fresh sheet paper over a portion of the map and starting fresh. When my youngest brother became a city planner, he quickly saw that real urban renewal projects required laws, lawyers, forms, and a stacak of regulations.

In  addition to those two games, we used our recyled paper to add extra streets to the Monopoly game. This provided us with new properties and higher profits as well as an exercise in what causes inflation since we had to keep creating more money to keep the bank solvent.

Oh, and we used to play outside in the dirt, too. Inside or outside, I think a few sheets of paper or a pile of sand in the yard taught us more about our imaginations than most of the games we could buy in a box. 

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell

Publisher: Thomas-Jacob Publishing

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Nook or Kindle, harcover or paperback, you have multiple ways to enjoy this novel.

 

You’d think a writer would be good at Scrabble

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Games2 Comments

We grew up playing the standard Scrabble board game. I usually lost. If my Aunt Vera was there, she usually beat everyone because she was either a droid or had the ability to see every potential move on the board like a grandmaster chess player.

Now I play Words with Friends on Facebook. I’m not sure why; I normally lose. See, look at this (one of my better games):

Being a writer doesn’t help. Maybe it hurts since I see words as whole structures rather than as groups of letters. Looking at a Words With Friends board, I have little idea what letters to add to the board to get high-scoring results. It’s been a lifetime trauma.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell’s short story collection, Widely Scattered Ghosts, is free on Smashwords during the company’s “give back” sale.