> Sam's new trivia catagory about board and card games should be fun.

I've always loved cards and the endless possibilities there are. Really, how many pieces of gaming equipment are there that, by itself, can offer essentially limitless possibilities? The card games that exist now don't even scratch the surface. Bridge and Pitch are two I particularly love, and I know more variations of solitaire than I can count. I even made up a card game once -- kind of a hybrid between Bridge and Pitch called "Pickle." I just may write it into a RinkWorks game some day.

We played a lot of Pitch on the camping trip I went on the weekend before last. That and the chess thing are, predictably, what inspired the trivia category.

> Did you know that collectors are looking for antique board games?

It doesn't surprise me. My mother has quite an old Monopoly set; I'll have to go see if I can find the date on it the next time I get a chance. It's probably newer than 1945, but perhaps not by much.

Anyway, she collects Monopoly boards. When we lived in Europe, we took the opportunity to pick up English, German, and French boards -- which are interesting, because the property names are all different (in the English version, St. Charles Place is Pall Mall; Atlantic Avenue is Leicester Square; Boardwalk is Mayfair; and so on), and the monetary denominations are adjusted by a constant factor to compensate for the difference in the respective nation's currency. (It's great playing Monopoly with 50,000 franc bills.) The Chance and Community Chest cards in the German and French versions are a great way to give those rusty foreign language skills a workout.