Game on!

Even occasional bloggers, of course, need material: they sometimes wonder what their next topic might be. But, every now and then, the topic simply pads down the hall and presents itself: like Cleo, this morning, at 5:45. Still wiping sleep from her eyes, she half-stumbled along the hall, looked at me, and mumbled something. Happily, though, I was already up, and so I steered her away from still-sleeping L., and we went downstairs to play some Blokus.

We've been playing a lot of Blokus - a cleverly simple game in which players try to lay colored tiles of various shapes corner to corner - recently. But in fact it's merely the latest in a relatively long line of board games and card games that have served as temporary favorites. Sure, for a brief time it was Candy Land; there was also a princess jewelry game, a world traveling game, and a quite handsome version of bingo based on a U.S. map. Recently, though, Cleo has begun to embrace games of real strategy, and I've been delighted to go along for the ride. There was Max, for example: a Canadian game in which players work together to try to steer little creatures out of the path of a hungry cat (typically, not all of the creatures make it, lending a sober edge to a rather quaint design). Mummy's Treasure, with its emphasis upon probability and geometry, fascinated for weeks, and now Cleo is trying her hand, too, at Mille Bournes, dishing out accident cards with the best of them. At 6 a.m. today, though, it was Blokus that Cleo wanted to play.

But even as the stack of manufactured games in the corner of the living room grows taller and taller, there is an equally rich vein of improvised games: brief moments of play or contest in which the rules evolve, as often as not, spontaneously (if, indeed, they're ever fully clear). It might be a variant on rock, paper, scissors, or a new permutation on the chase games that we've played on playgrounds for more than a year now. Or, last night, it was more of a trivia game: Cleo was in the bath, and the stereo downstairs was still playing the Disney channel that we'd called up during our after-dinner game of Mille Bournes. Upstairs, Cleo could just make out the music, and - given that she's seen a substantial fraction of the Disney corpus at this point - began to try to identify the compositions. "For the first time," I heard her cry, as she recognized a tune from Frozen, "in forever!" Moments later, though, a hint of doubt: "Is this Rapunzel?" And then, an admission of the limits of her abilities: "What is this one?" (It was from Aladdin, which she hasn't yet seen). I'd thought, in other words, that she was only taking a bath, but in fact she was playing Name that Tune.

And not only playing that. A few minutes later, I heard her clearly announce, "I'm going to throw a real duck in the water." A fraction of a second later, there was a clear splash. "I just threw a real duck in the water," she observed, aloud. And then continued, in the same vein: "I'm going to throw a real frog in the water. I just threw a real frog in the water." A hippo followed. And once again, rules had seemingly materialized, where moments earlier there had been no game at all.

Rather like, you might say, Cleo herself, at 5:45 on a Saturday morning.