Family Game Night ~ Part 1

 Sorry that some of the pictures are blurry! The place I was taking the pictures at didn’t have great lighting. And, I just realized that my Isabelle’s birthday was on May 2! I totally forgot! Once I finish taking pictures for part two of Family Game Night, I’m going to make a post about Izzy and Molly celebrating their birthdays.

 “Welcome to our first family game night!” I said dramatically.

I turned to the Ever After High girl, Briar Beauty, and held the bowl in my arms out to her.

The bright red bowl I was holding had ten slips of paper inside. Each paper had one of our names written on it. There were only nine of us, and we wanted to divide into equal teams of two to play Monopoly Millionaire, so we had invited Briar Beauty to play with us.

“Briar, will you help me?” I asked. She nodded, and I continued. “Just draw two pieces of paper from here at a time, until the bowl the is empty. The names on the papers you draw will be a team.”

I placed the bowl on the ground so Bri could reach it.

I hope I get either Molly, Tracy, or Savannah on my team, I thought as Briar stuck her hands into the bowl. But not Caroline. And I hope that Savannah and Tracy don’t get put on the same team together.

Tracy and Savannah were both extremely competitive. If they were together, then we were all doomed. There wouldn’t be any point in playing, because we all knew who would win: Team Savannah Tracy Savannah .

Briar pulled two slips of paper from the bowl. She opened them up and read, “Ivy and Tracy.”

I let out a tiny sigh of relief. At least Tracy and Ana weren’t going to destroy us all.

Briar took two more slips from the bowl. “Caroline and Savannah.” Again and again she drew papers from the container until the teams were:

Ivy and Tracy

Caroline and Savannah

Saige and Molly

Isabelle and Emily

Bri and MJ

We went over to the Monopoly Millionaire game board and found our partners.

Molly and Saige set up a Guess Who? game a few feet away. Monopoly Millionaire was a four person — or, in our case, four team — game, so one team wouldn’t have been able to play. Saige and Molly didn’t even want to play Monopoly with us, so they had volunteered to do something different.

I grabbed the stack of property cards before anyone else could and announced, “I’m going to be the real estate agent.” I was always the real estate agent.

I put my hands behind my back and made a number on my fingers. “Guess a number from one to fifteen,” I told everyone.

Savannah and Caroline glanced at each other. “Um . . . four,” Ana said.

“Ten,” called MJ.

“Fourteen!” from Tracy and Ivy.

“Seven?” my teammate, Isabelle, guessed.

I held my hands out in front of me and showed them the number. “It was eight,” I said. “So that means that Izzy and I go first.”

“I bet she saw your hands! She was sitting right next to you, after all,” Tracy suggested accusingly.

Isabelle had a hurt look on her face as she replied, “I didn’t see her hands! I promise!”

I believed her. Isabelle was extremely truthful.

Apparently everyone else believed her, too, as they didn’t object when Isabelle picked the airplane pieces for our team.

Soon, each team had chosen a piece, and we lined them up at “GO” in the order that we would take turns: us, MJ and Bri, Caroline and Ana, and Tracy and Ivy.

I looked at Isabelle. “So, um,” I began, “how do we play as a team? Like, do we switch who rolls the die each turn, or what?”

Isabelle scooped the die off the ground and pressed one in my hand. “We can each roll one of them.”

We each tossed our dice into the air. They landed with the numbers six and three facing up.

Izzy held the tiny plastic paper airplane between her fingers and moved it across the board, setting it down on the ninth square.

I pushed the card covering the property away and read the information on the board aloud: “Castle View. 35,000 dollars.”

My teammate picked up the card and read it to me. “Luxury limo ride. Buy or auction this space and then advance to GO. Use now.”

Once she’d finished speaking, I asked, “Are you in favor of buying it?”

Isabelle nodded.

I took $35,000 from the stack of Monopoly money in front of Izzy and put it in the bank.

I rifled through the deeds until I found the property card from Castle View.

 

We ended our turn, and MJ and Bri went. They each rolled a dice and got the number seven.

“Seven is my lucky number,” MJ told Briar. “We’re going to win this game!”

“Really? How is it your lucky number?” Bri asked.

MJ mumbled, “Yeah, um, I kinda just said that it was my lucky number . . .”

 Their tiny green scooter piece landed on Lakeside Marina.

“Let’s buy it!” MJ scooped up $20,000. “I mean, look how cheap it is.”

Briar flipped their card over and shrieked, “Bad credit rating! We have to auction it!”

Soon we were all shouting out numbers and waving fake money in the air, bidding for the property.

Caroline and Savannah got it in the end, at the high price of $50,000. The Lakeside Marina was only even worth $20,000!

It was on my team’s seventh turn, after MJ and Bri had been sent to jail twice, and I only had two stacks of money, that I thought that it might be a good idea to count it.

We had eleven yellow bills and six purple ones. We had more than one million!

 “We won, we won, we won!!” I exclaimed, jumping up and doing a victory dance with Isabelle. (Her dance actually had real moves in it, while mine mostly consisted of pumping my arms and whooping.)

“So, um, who got second?” Tracy asked.

I froze. Than I faced Tracy and said, very seriously, “You do not interrupt someone’s victory dance. Do you not know better, you fool?”

Tracy just shrugged and stuck her tongue out at me.

“Stupid mortal!” I yelled, charging my older sister (sort of) playfully.

She gasped in horror. Her mouth opened and closed as she tried to come up with a better Percy Jackson insult. “Um . . . spawn of Hera!”

I let loose a scream and tackled Tracy.

The rest of our family tried to separate us, but their coaxing voices were drowned out in the din of Percy Jackson insults . . .

To be continued . . .