Candy Crush – Writer of Sweet Small Town Stories of Love and Family

I play Words With Friends every day. Word Chums most days. Candy Crush Saga some days.

I’ve played Word Brain, Draw Something, and Angry Birds.

wwf They’re all fun and fine. Word Brain just got too dang hard. Draw Something became tedious because I: a) can’t draw well to begin with and b) really can’t draw well with my finger on a screen. I do still play Draw Something with my granddaughter, but that’s it. When she gets bored and moves on, I’ll delete it again.

Angry Birds is still fun but it can be too addicting. It’s too easy to keep saying ‘one more try,’ and then a half hour goes by. With Candy Crush, when I run out of lives (usually in about fifteen minutes), then my play time is over.

I try to not respond to WWF and Word Chums every time I get a notification. They’re fun, but they can be a time suck. And I want to have something more to show for my day than having “fun” while glued to a phone screen.

Oh, pearl I also play Pearl’s Perils on Facebook. It’s a hidden object kind of game. I’m about to burn out on it too. It has limited lives which is good, but you have to earn “badges” and “decorate” your island to advance and I’m no longer accumulating the virtual coins to keep the next level open when I get there and I have to spend days playing levels I’ve already finished in order to accumulate coins. I know it’s on purpose by the designers to get players to pay real money for virtual money. That makes zero sense to me, so I don’t. Although they occasionally run a sale and I may pay $1.99 for a bunch of fake money and extra lives.

What’s your favorite game app? Is it a time suck? How do you avoid the whole time suck wormhole?

“The game’s afoot, Watson,” Sherlock Holmes would say to his sidekick.

He meant he was about to bring some nefarious evil-doer to justice.

Nowadays, we play board games and video games. Games on our phones, on our computers, and on tabletops. We play games by ourselves, with friends, and with strangers the computer algorithms choose for us.

We can play a Scrabble-like word puzzle game. We can blow up candies. We can search for hidden items in rooms and mazes. We can build virtual farms and castle grounds.

We can spend so much time in these virtual worlds that we’re surprised when real carrots take longer than twelve hours to sprout and grow.

We recently played a very fun game that with a group moves from amusing to hysterically funny.

Telestrations is a combination of the old campfire game, Telephone, and the party game, Pictionary. Each player has a small sketchpad and draws an illustration of either a word or phrase, then passes their sketch. The next person looks only at the drawing, flips a page, writes a guess, flips the page and passes the pad.

The next one reads the guess and draws the word/phrase. And so on. Each person takes turns either guessing or drawing. When the pad has completed its circle around the players, hilarity ensues as the various drawings and guesses are revealed.

It’s fun enough to bring back group games and make me forget it’s my turn on Words With Friends.

What’s your favorite board game? Do you play games online or on your phone?

Tag: Candy Crush

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