Villa Paletti

This Friday I made Minestrone soup in my long-since-borrowed crockpot. Oh hooray! It wasn't as good as I hoped it could be. Next time I will be sure to add more spices. Jonathan and Dione brought delicious home made bread. Italian herb! mmmmm That really didn't stick around for long and it will most definitely be invited back again.

After dinner, this occurred:

Why am I sitting on the floor, covering my face, with colorful, wooden things littering the ground? You may ask. Well, I suppose I ought to tell you.

Jonathan and Dione arrived this fine yesterday with a little box containing the most amazing German game. Apparently Germans are very good at coming up with games that involve nothing but, as dear Emily puts it, little bits of wood. This particular game is called Villa Paletti. I can just guess that the word 'paletti' means something along the lines of: Haphazard, unsteady, dangerous, misaligned, structurally unsound, wobbly... you get the point, or do you?

The box depicts some very confused or distressed citizens amongst the topsy-turvy attempts at some sort of structure. As you see in the foreground that man with the red beard looks simply agast at the set of instructions he holds in his lap. The other friends ponder the looks of the structure, perhaps discussing what exactly went awry.

Here we are in the first part of the game. It begins with all the vertical pieces holding up the largest horizontal piece. Each player, upon his or her turn, must extract his or her choice of assigned colored piece. If the extraction is successful, the player progressively places said piece apon the horizontal piece. It goes like this until a player is unable to extract a piece on the bottom-most layer for fear of topple (and is not subsequently challenged).

The game gets progressively tenser and tenser until, the inevitable happens. Here, as you can see by the picture I first displayed to you, I was the most unfortunate. Upon attempting to place my piece most carefully upon the highest horizontal layer, I toppled the entire configuration.

After playing once more, we progressed to Set.

Until next time...
~Out