This is one of the best deals for games at Target that I’ve seen in ages:

Monopoly Deal (card game) and Bop It for $1.00; that’s Bop It for $14 ($5 manufacturers coupon and a $3 Target coupon) with the free (Hasbro purchases over $10) Monopoly card game (and also using a $5 off Monopoly manufacturers coupon). Need 3 coupons total.
or
Connect 4 and Monopoly Deal (card game) for $2.00! That’s Connect 4 for $14 ($4 manufacturers coupon and a $3 Target coupon) with the free (Hasbro purchases over $10) Monopoly card game (using a $5 off Monopoly manufacturers coupon). Need 3 coupons total.

So in essence, they’re paying you $5 to take the free Monopoly Deal card game (which is rated 5 stars at Amazon).

Here’s a link to the coupons over at SlickDeals.net. Just so you know, you actually print these coupons come from Coupons.com and Target.com so they are legit and if you’ve never used either coupon site, they will want to install some kind of coupon printer application (for your Macintosh or Windows PC).

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So I really like playing dominoes and I don’t mean standing them all up on end and knocking them all down. Playing dominoes is like playing card games: you’ve got a bunch of “bones” instead of “cards” and an infinite number of games that can be played with the cards bones. Dominoes come in different sizes: double sixes (this would make the highest domino have a 6 at both ends), double nines, double twelves and double fifteens, think of them as playing a game with multiple decks of cards. Using double nines is my favorite for about 2-4 people and double twelves for 4 or more; double fifteens just have too many dots on them to look at. Oh, and I like the dominoes with the dots with different colors; it helps in avoiding mistakes after too many hours of play.

And of course with all games everyone has their variations; in Euchre you’ve got ‘Ace, no face’ and you get a re-deal (if they play that way) and if no one picks trump do you ‘screw the dealer’ (make them pick a suit) or re-deal? And many people play Monopoly with their own rules, such as: put utility payments on Free Parking and whomever lands on it, wins the the cash. Dominoes is no different everyone plays every game slightly different.

One of the games I like is “Mexican Train” (which I’m sure has racist origins with it’s name), the nice thing about it is that it’s easy to teach, there is no math (except at the end of a round) and you’re really just (strategically) matching your dominoes from end to end. Here’s a good set of Mexican Train Dominoes instructions with some additional directions. It’s really too complicated to explain here which is why I provided a link to the instructions. Many sets are sold as Mexican Train sets but they just include a “train station” for the starting block and little train pieces as markers, we just use the starting block as the train station and pennies for markers.

About halfway through we realized we that we forgot the mexican train part! That plus the few other parts we goofed up made me think that maybe we made up a new game?!?

So I checked out the rules, trying to remember the parts we forgot and saw some different rules:

• “In this first turn only, the player may play as many dominoes as they wish, so long as they form a valid train”, I’ve never seen anyone play it that way, we’ve always taken turns putting one down at a time per turn.
• “If any player is unable to start their train – having no domino that matches the centre double – they do not draw from the boneyard”, don’t think we’ve ever done it that way either! Always make them draw one.
• We also play that you have to announce when you are down to your last domino, if you don’t by the time the next player picks up and someone calls you on it, you pick up another piece (I don’t know if I learned it that way or accidentally transferred the rule from a different domino game).

There were some other differences too, but some seemed to be tied into the earlier differences. But as long as you all play by the same rules, I guess it really doesn’t matter.

There is another domino game game we play that I like (and don’t know the name) where you don’t score unless you add up all the ends of the pieces of the board and it’s a multiple of five, this one is a lot more confusing.

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Just a quick tip on winning: The easy way to remember which pieces are the winning game pieces for this year’s Monopoly game is they are the last piece alphabetically in their set; except in the case of Boardwalk (which is the major winning game piece).

Be sure to keep me in mind if you use this tip to win the big bucks ;)

I believe this is the same system they’ve used in the previous five years (possibly longer).

My problem with this is remembering the other pieces in the sequence to know if it’s the last one alphabetically…

Water Works – $50 – Odds 1 in 639,000
Mediterranean Avenue – $100 – Odds 1 in 5,701,000
Short Line Railroad – $500 – Odds 1 in 311,389,700
Vermont Avenue – $1,000 – Odds 1 in 106,921,400
Virginia Avenue – $2,000 – Odds 1 in 106,921,400
Tennessee Avenue – $5,000 – Odds 1 in 307,947,900
Kentucky Avenue – $10,000 – Odds 1 in 307,947,900
Ventnor Avenue – $25,000 – Odds 1 in 769,869,600
Pennsylvania Avenue – $50,000 – Odds 1 in 769,869,600
Golden Avenue – $100,000 – Odds 1 in 178,065,100
Boardwalk – $1,000,000 – Odds 1 in 591,287,650

Pretty slim odds, even for the low-end prizes.

* FYI – This is what I found out from looking around on-line and is the system I’m using. I don’t have any connection with the official game/rules.

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This is a great parody of “Rock Band” sung to the tune of “Roxanne”.

Found at nehatiwari.com after catching her segment on PopSiren. A Revision3.com production.

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So today’s LensDay dealt with flowers so this week so I submitted this photo that I took in Egypt. I thought most of the flowers from there seemedso bright and beautiful. The other people on the trip compared it to flowers in Hawaii but since I’ve never been there I attributed it to the Egyptian mystique…

I just thought they all seemed so bright and beautiful….

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So imagine this: You’ve got some kind of handheld inviso-detecter-o-rama and through the viewfinder you can see the invisible creatures in your world. Better yet, if you can see them, you can shoot them. Now imagine this handheld device looks an awful lot like your Treo.

ToySpring has created a game, called Arcade Reality, using your Treo that uses the live image from your camera to to superimpose the creatures on. So it appears as if you are fighting arcade creatures in real life. Here are some more screenshots.

Personally, I don’t see how they can get enough processing power out of these handhelds to do this, but the machine might have overlay capabilities that I’m not aware of (I’ve never tried to program a Palm like that). Or they might just be faster than I think. I have seen some zippy video games, I juse don’t play them that much these days…

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So check out LineRider. Just draw a slope (not too steep) and hit play! Hit stop and you can modify your drawing. It’s entertaining (at least for a few minutes)

From Rocketboom.

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As we all know, I’m not a huge fan of sports, normally I’d be hard pressed to know who’s in the World Series. But being from the Detroit area I was curious as to how they were doing tonight. Unfortunately they’ve got rain, much too much rain to play so the game has been delayed. I’m not sure if they might still play tonight or not. Very sad for the sports geeks who had their whole night planned out…

I know how I feel when Apple has a press conference and Steve Jobs doesn’t announce the product I was expecting…

You can tell I’m not into sports that much when I’m wondering how “they are doing” and not how “we are doing”.

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The new iPods have brighter screens and up to 80 GB hard drives (with a 60% brighter screen). It’s also set to play more games these days too (I’d like a nice Scrabble).

The new redesigned Nano now goes up to 8 GB!!! I think the nano looks more like the old minis but smaller.

I’m really thinking I might need me one of these. Mine doesn’t have the video and I’ve been thinking that might be a nice feature. At $349 for 80 GB that’s a nice price (I think I paid $599 for the 60 GB when they first came out). Usually these are about 5% cheaper for education employees but I’m not seeing the discount :(

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She had 1 penny, $400,000 and $750,000 on the board so they offered her $375,000. A very generous offer as the show goes. If she doesn’t take the money she has to open one more. She said she was a gambler so this should have been easy and Howie pretty much spelled it out for her that there were 3 options if she picked the case:

So I was going to finish up the followup to the Alex Rider post before I hopped in the sack but then I remembered I didn’t mention my dreams!

So I’ve had odd dreams lately (the last two days) with lots of advertising. This is odd for several reasons, I generally don’t remember my dreams and when I remember them as well as I did this morning they’re usually normal, as in I’m not sure if the stuff really happened or not.

So back to the advertising dream: I think I was in Cingular (which I actually needed to go to today) and there were people there in Dominoes’ uniforms trying to sell me a Dell. They made a phone call to their friends who were at Taco Bell and wanted to meet up with me and we were going to go eat and get eggs or omelets or something like that. Oh and I think the friend’s played on a baseball team, which I would assume is the Tigers since Dominoes’ owned them at one time.

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I was a little disappointed with the opening ceremonies with the olympics. A few neat things but I wasn’t enthralled, even with TiVo to get me through the slow spots. The fireworks and sparkler type things were awesome!

And who’s this guy who’s doing some of the commentary for the skating? Dick Button? They act like he’s some hotshot but so far (IMHO) he’s just this dorky guy who’s annoying (seems kinda mean).

Later: Okay, so I looked him up, he’s won a few gold in skating (over half a century ago), but he’s still kinda gruff for figure skating.

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So we played WhirlyBall again yesterday!!! I love playing this game. If you haven’t seen me mention WhirlyBall before, it’s kinda like basket ball but with a whiffle ball/scoop and you’re driving a bumper car!

We were at WhirlyBall West in West Bloomfield, MI. I didn’t have any problems the few other times I played but I knew I was going to have a few bruises this time and sure enough the two spots where I knew I got bumped while bouncing around the car are looking pretty colorful.

There’s a video on the web site that gives a sample of what a game is like. It makes the game seem pretty slow where it seems quite busy the whole time you play…

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So I was in the newspaper today (image of article) and they ran a photo too so that made it a even more fun. At least I assume the photo was in the printed edition. It’s the local paper by where I work so I’ll have to check it out next week, but I remembered to check on-line and there it was “Expert shares advice on technology deals”.

Here’s the story, people always ask me what tech stuff to buy and how to get good deal on it. So a few jobs ago I started doing sessions for people who were interested and I’d get stuff together and they’d come with questions and I’d tell them what they “needed”. This job I started opening it up to the public for parents (I work for a school district) and residents and I do it near Thanksgiving so I can give them tips on all the Thanksgiving sales that’ll start on Friday. Then they can figure out if it’s worth getting up early for if it’s one of those killer deals. This year one of the paper’s reporters came and voila I’m in the local paper (she had mentioned the dates in the paper too).

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While not actually a board, my favorite is actually Dominoes, which (if you’ve never played) is like playing cards, they’re a million games you can play with one set. As actual board games go Scrabble is probably my favorite regular old board game.

It’s trivia, has a board and requires a DVD player: Scene It? It’s the best trivia game out there, games are fast and it’s easy to learn.

From Tuesday’s Tales via The Daily Meme.

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Why would they do this?!? Sugar Free? And the box looks the same! That’s just mean!

So I was going to have a bowl of cereal as a little snack tonight and I was pretty disappointed. I don’t generally keep sugar around the house so I had to use powdered sugar. It actually worked pretty good, just don’t watch anything too funny when you eat it because if you laugh you might accidentally inhale some of the sugar…

Think dry cardboard-ish Cherrios, but still in cool letter shapes.

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Two-Hundred Twenty-Five Million dollars! The MegaMillions drawing is tonight. I’m off to spend a dollar (or two)…

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So I got this package in the mail the other day (from a small mail order company). It had a Skylab stamp on it! It was only a 10 cent stamp (actually it had other old 10 cent stamps on it too) so that makes it about 20 years old. It was strange, I assumed if they had hundreds of these laying around it that it’d be better to sell them for a few pennies more than to actually use them. And it’s a nice Stamp I’ve always liked the way that one looked so it really caught my eys. My purchase was a $100 upgrade to something I had already purchased preciously so I’m assuming they weren’t scraping for loose change to mail this. It just struck me as strange…

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