Dogs welcome soldiers home

I don’t know if there’s anything more heart-warming to watch than videos of dogs being reunited with their owners after they’ve been away at war.

Probably the best thing about this particular video is the dog breaking down into literal howls of happiness. It’s absolutely gorgeous.

It reminds me of when I went away to France for three weeks. When I came back, the moment I walked in the front door our two Cavalier King Charles Spaniels immediately ran into the kitchen to sit by their bowls and wait for me to feed them. How sweet.

For more happy dog reunions, check out this link.

 

Board games: the silent predators

Never underestimate the power of board games to create hatred in places it has no business being.

Every time I play a board game at my boyfriend’s house, somebody gets grumpy. I’ll be honest though, it is usually me.

Perhaps the worst game of them all is Risk. I mean, sure, in Monopoly you’re taking the properties other people want; snatching their money out from underneath their noses, and in Scrabble you can always sabotage someone’s next turn by spoiling the spot they were eyeing up. But Risk. Oh, Risk.

For those of you who haven’t played it, Risk involves placing little armies over a map of the world, then trying to attack everyone else’s armies in order to achieve every super villain’s desire, WORLD DOMINATION. The amount of continents you take over controls how many extra soldiers you get on your next turn, so if you capture a continent, you can be damn sure somebody’s going to try and take it off you before your next turn comes around. The annoying thing is, they only need to seize back one country within that continent to rob you of the extra soldiers you were hoping for.  That, I think, is where the most conflict lies.

You have not experienced true rage until you’ve had someone steal a continent from you several times in a row.

Then we have the ‘table talk’. This is where your skills of persuasion come into play. You’re simultaneously being the angel and the devil on the other player’s shoulder, coercing them into attacking someone else – whether it’s because you don’t want them attacking you, or because that ‘someone else’ is a significant threat to you. As a result of this, half of the game is usually spent with people trying to convince each other who to attack, and how to do it. And boy does that ruffle some feathers.

So perhaps Risk isn’t the best thing for strengthening bonds between people. My boyfriend usually forbids me to so much as touch him because he gets so grouchy at me, and many a game has played out with people sitting in sullen silence and shooting dirty looks at others across the board.

Maybe we should just play Ludo.