h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A few weeks ago, I would have said that I was all for the board games. But my husband has introduced me to the wonder and variety of computer games and I am hooked! I have been playing Populous and Dungeon Keeper (not at the same time, obviously! I am good at multi tasking, but not THAT good!!) And I have also played through and finished Startopia and Virtual Cop II. I understand from my beloved that these are quite old computer games, but I am thoroughly enjoying the challenge.

We do find though that computer gaming is essentially an individual pursuit. We have tried watching the other one play a computer game and cheering or suggesting strategies, but we found that we ended up have rather large (and extremely silly) arguments. For example… we had one argument about the placement of a guard tower and how many wildmen to convert. We didn’t speak to one another for HOURS afterwards!!

The best thing about computer games is that you can leave them, save them and come back to them. You can't do that with board games. And some board games take FOREVER to finish.

I reckon I spend about three hours gaming during the week. This is all I can fit in around all the other commitments I have. The weekend is another story entirely. Last Saturday I spent five hours beating the daylights out of adventurers and all stupid enough to lurch into my dungeon. I really enjoyed myself. Perhaps I should get out more?!

I have never tried network gaming, and I think I should avoid it! I suspect I will get addicted very quickly and then watch in horror as my telephone bill climbs and climbs!!

I play a LOT of computer games, but my wife probably logs as much time on just a handful of games. In the past, she was hooked on Tetris, then Freecell (the solitaire game that came with Win95/98). She returned from a family visit having played Spider Solitaire which comes with Win XP. Her family told me to upgrade to XP so she could play Spider ...

But I did find her a version of Spider on a collection of solitaire games, now she's hooked on it. For a break, she plays Boggle (a word finding game) and a few others, but Spider is the big attraction.

The big attraction of computer solitaire games is the "undo", all the way back to the deal in the case of her version of Spider. So you can keep trying til you get it, difficult with real cards. Freecell has the added attraction of knowing that every deal is solvable (except one, according to Games Magazine). Plus they are uniquely numbered, I think, so you can talk about "hand 34615" with friends.