i spent the afternoon and most of the evening at the boyfriend's today. and while being the kaypoh that i am, i started looking around the various shelves and bric-a-brac lying around his cosy (because we had sex there before) room. and lo and behold, i found something that belonged to my childhood:

A STACK OF ALI BABA CARDS.

something that i bet most kids of the next generation would never get to see very soon. and this is very true given our era of Xboxes, Nintendo DS-es, Playstations and Wiis. even simple ol' skool games like Boggle and Yahtzee have to be churned out into gaming console games before any of these kids would play it again. in fact, whatever happened to board games? Battleship? Guess Who? Connect 4? all not considered a game unless it comes complete with sound effects, a console controller, vibrating function, cheatcodes and hidden levels.

in fact, Ali Baba is one of the simplest games that i've ever known. you need a basic knowledge of numbers and plenty of luck to win. players draw random cards from their decks and proceed to lay them face down. once ready, the concealed cards are revealed and basically, the smaller number beats the bigger one. star cards trump everything else. there's another version of this game that comes in aquatic and marine life with mines and i think the submarine being the trump cards.

i remember spending hours on end playing Ali Baba with the brother during our younger and much closer days. now i can't imagine playing a game without a game console controller. anything that doesn't involve magic spells, weapons, professions, power levelling and HP makes me awfully bored.

but of course, i make exceptions for Full Body Contact Twister.

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