It all started with Mario and Angelica kindly inviting us round their´s on Saturday night. A few bottles of wine and plenty of botanas after arriving, the first tentative steps were made toward “Family Games Night”. Aranza brought Parcheesi, which is like Ludo with strategic elements. It´s popular in Spain though I´ve never played it before. After a few teething troubles (you roll one die, not two) we were completely absorbed in getting our tiddlywinks (fichitas) to circle the board and get home, and taking great malicious pleasure in blocking and eating other players´ fichas along the way. We lost.

Next up was one of my favourites, a Jenga type game, but with a twist that enabled the makers to dodge the patent issues and call it Stacko. Each jenga block was either red, yellow, green or blue and had a number from 1 to 4 on it like Uno, so if the last person removed a red #3, you had to go for a red block or one with #3 on it which makes it a lot harder. Luckily they´re all made from polished plastic so it´s not quite as hard as the artesanal wooden jenga thing we have.

Anyroad, all this nonsense went on until 3am and then some as it turned out we’ve all got quite the competitive streak. Many thanks, M & A 😀

Sunday we got up late, unsurprisingly. I went to the baratillo (huge Tapatian street market on the other side of town) and took a fair few photos. I stumbled into this church too, which is an architectural oddity, I’ve no idea what it’s called.

Afterwards I nipped by Amour Fou to pick up some stuff and got persuaded to play Mexican Scrabble. It was going great guns, practically every letter is worth 4 points and there were about 8 blanks (each worth 1 pt). However it started to get tricky as the board filled up and there seemed to be an endless supply of letters. I counted and there were 200 tiles to put on a 15×15 board (225). Madness I tells you. I don’t think the manufacturers of this game had every tried to play it. Cos unless you start placing your tiles vertically, upwords style, there’s no chance of finishing. And how they dared put in 4 Ws beggars belief. It’s not a letter that features much in the Spanish dictionary, it’s almost always just foreign words like Whiskey, Walkie-Talkie, Windsurfing and gWyn…

After that, Uno, which was a lot more fast moving than Scrabble with a 90% board coverage.

At my photo journalism seminar yesterday one of the attendees was complaining about having bought the Mexico edition of Monopoly and one of the squares having less-than-popular ex-president Vicente Fox on it. What were they thinking? I’d love a Tapatian (Guadalajaran) version of it, mind. I reckon the market’s ready… Collect the utilities, SIAPA, CFE, TELMEX and MEGACABLE…