Who's SORRY Now?

There is no forgiveness.

Because my children are now 5 and 7 years old, Mrs. The Anthony Show and I felt it was time to supplement their collection of board games.

Last year we bought our son (the older one) Battleship and Trouble, and this year we picked up Sorry! and Stratego. Both of these new games reacquainted me with old memories passing lazy summer days with neighborhood friends, gathered 'round a board game on a picnic table or stoop or garage floor.

It also reminded me that young siblings can be major pains in the ass — to themselves, and, more importantly, to me.


WHICH COLOR MEANS "I WANT THIS GAME TO END AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE"?

This makes me uncomfortable.

I hadn't played Trouble with the kids in quite a while, and Battleship is a two-person affair that my daughter is still unable to grasp, so I'd forgotten about the heated competition that begins even before the first roll of the dice or draw of the card: what color pawns each person is going to use.

In traditional up-to-four-player games, the colors available are red, blue, green, and yellow. Usually, everyone wants to be blue or red, green turns out to be a default color if you're not near the top of the social ladder in your game-playing circuit, and no one wants to be yellow. Occasionally you'll find a game with an unusual color like purple or black, and everyone will want to be that color.

I don't know what yellow's problem is. It is, after all, a primary color. Maybe it reminds kids of urine, but on the other hand it's the color of bananas, a fruit that (almost) all kids love as well as the color of Big Bird. On the other other hand, if either of my kids declared his/her favorite color to be yellow, I'd probably be worried. I don't know why I'd be worried, but I'd have the school psychologist on speed dial.

Just for the hell of it, I typed "yellow" into Google, and one of the top results was a video for a Coldplay song called "Yellow." I was curious about this, but because I would rather sew my own colon shut while lunching at Taco Bell than listen to a Coldplay song, I searched for the lyrics instead, and this is how the song starts:

Look at the stars,
Look how they shine for you,
And everything you do,
Yeah, they were all yellow.
I came along,
I wrote a song for you,
And all the things you do,
And it was called "Yellow." 

If either of my kids likes this "Yellow," I'm leaving them out of my will.

THEY'VE BEEN FIGHTING SINCE THE FIRST TIME I WROTE "YELLOW"
But I digress. The point is, we can't even begin the game, because the kids are fighting over which color they're going to be. Somehow, we work it out based on some bribe or compromise that I'll later regret but was made in the heat of the moment to shut everyone up and that somehow balances everything out (Son gets to be red, Daughter settles for blue and I give her five Whoppers — the malted milk balls, not the burgers — but Son then gets two Whoppers as well because he thought Daughter getting five was unfair, but I have to slip him the three Whoppers without Daughter seeing, and already I'm setting my kids up to be demanding negotiator assholes), and play finally commences.

I'd forgotten how complicated Sorry! can be, especially because that was one of the games my family didn't own, so I only played it at Mary Langston's house, and she was more of a friend of my brother's so I didn't go to her house that often and when I did and if we did play a game we'd more often play Parcheesi and anyway.

The moves in Sorry! are dictated by cards that tell you how many spaces to move. This is handy if you are incapable of counting dots on dice or lack the strength to push that snowglobe popper thing on the Trouble board that has a die with Arabic numerals instead of dots and there's always some wiseass who tries to claim that the 6 is actually a 9.

But the cards force you to think in a way that makes you feel like you survived a braining and had re-learn how to count. There are no 6 or 9 cards, to avoid that wiseass problem I described above, and the 3, 5, 8, and 12 cards are very simple: just move 3, 5, 8, or 12 spaces. Here's where it gets complicated:

• The 1 card lets you move move a pawn from Start or move a pawn one space forward.
• The 2 card also lets you move a pawn from Start (but ONE space, not two!) or move a pawn two spaces but either way you get to draw again.
• The 4 card forces you to move four spaces. Backward. Because they said so.
• The 7 card...all right, get ready: move a pawn seven forward or split the seven spaces between two pawns (like four spaces for one pawn and three for another). But NO, you can't split it into five/two or six/one so you can move a pawn out of start. SO DON'T FRIGGING TRY IT!
• The 10 lets you move either ten spaces forward or one space (that's one space, not ten!) backward. If you're unable to move forward ten spaces, you have to go back one space. Tough shit.
• The 11 allows you to move 11 spaces forward or switch places with one of your opponent's pawn, in which case he's allowed to call you a dick.

Miraculously, the kids understood and were all right with these concepts. The problem was the Sorry! card. The Sorry! card allows you to take your stuck-in-Start pawn and switch it with any opponent's in-play pawn   and sent your opponent's hard-working pawn back to his Start, where the pawn's remaining Start buddies will all be like, "What did you do to break parole?"

And you're supposed to say to your angry opponent, "Sorry!" This does not always smooth things over.

GAME CALLED DUE TO WHINING
I have yet to finish a three-person game with my kids. The last one ended prematurely like this:

Son picks Sorry! card. Daughter is the only player with a piece on the active board, so Son has to swap her piece. "Sorry!" he says. (I encourage them to beat on my pawns when they can, because unlike them, I don't play the game with an urgency of a Gamblers Anonymous dropout waging a mortgage payment.) Daughter starts to throw a fit, and Son and I are able to calm her down after calmly explaining that her brother had no other choice, because there were no other pieces on the board. Daughter rubs eyes, sniffs, mumbles something only a fellow 5-year-old would comprehend, and play continues as Son and I look at each other like, "We dodged a bullet there."

Daughter's turn. She picks a Sorry! card. The only piece on the active board is the one that Son moved with his Sorry! card. Daughter swaps her piece, says "Sorry!" Son throws fit. Wash, rinse, repeat...Dad goes into his bedroom and shuts the door and ogles the celebrities in his wife's People magazine.