Inspired by my recent chess triumphs, I've been inspired to seek out an online draughts/checkers game - and I have found one.

https://cardgames.io/checkers/

Except I'm rubbish at it. I'm so used to playing chess that I can't remember how to even play draughts anymore. It keeps murdering me.

This thread is where we can discuss the game that's now proven to be harder than chess.

I've just lost again! Why is it so difficult?

Despite being brilliant with my hands and being beyond brainy I am almost universally terrible at board games of any sort.

Chess, draughts, backgammon, you name it.

Cards.

Video games too.

And I'm really sh*t at sports.

I wasn't all that good at RPGs either.

I was very very good as a DM or a Keeper (of Arcane Lore), because it involved writing my own stories/scenarios and 'telling' them in weird and wonderful ways, but as a player...

Not so much.

Is draughts the one that old men, fingering their worry beads between turns, used to play outside pubs?

Isn't that dominos?

Eh?

Draughts is played on a chess board with flat discs of white and black.

It's like chess for idiots.

WhatDoesThisButtonDo? wrote:

Isn't that domino's?

Dominoes is what old black gents play and smash the table in half when they slam down the winning donimo.

I seem to recall some people getting murdered in Harlesden over a game of dominoes a decade or so ago.

Nightjar wrote:

Despite being brilliant with my hands and being beyond brainy I am almost universally terrible at board games of any sort.

Chess, draughts, backgammon, you name it.

Cards.

Video games too.

And I'm really sh*t at sports.

I'm the opposite. Despite having next to no interest, I almost always win. I even came second (out of a couple of hundred) in a compulsory cross country race, despite stopping to have a fag and a rest on a bench at roughly the halfway point. I think that remains my proudest physical achievement.

In the opinion of others, I'm also a natural in defence positions in hockey and football. I put that down to my overwhelming feelings of absolute rage that anyone should attempt to take advantage of me - amplified if they have the nerve to do so literally in front of me. I've never really seen the point of team sports.

Maybe it is dominos. I wonder where my antique Indian ivory dominos are. They were very beautiful. A reverse of the usual black with white dots.

cosmictanya wrote:

I'm the opposite.

So, you're saying that you're an ham-fisted thicko?

Exactly. I think the greatest curse of my life has been the need to develop unnatural abilities and a reserve of cynicism. I'd be so much happier as the thick optimist I know myself to be at heart.

But surely that's why you went to Bristol?

I went because I like the city, and its close to my beloved Bath. They both have such gentle atmospheres and lovely honey buildings.

It also had a very high percentage of privately educated people so I presumed a lucrative divorce would be easy enough to achieve.

I was always under the impression that Brizzle and various art schools were where ladies of a certain intellectual capacity went.

Or, all the really poshest universities.

Studying History of Art or Classics.

Graduation day is like the latter-day version of the debutant's c*ming out ceremony.

Oh the Oxbridge failures you mean. I didn't consider them, and due to my (vindicated) belief that GCSE's and mock exams were a waste of energy and only worth getting up for if it wasn't raining, I doubt they'd have been impressed with my attitude anyway. 

Had I been applying this year, I'd have been absolutely f***ed if I was reliant on past performance prediction. I might've had to go to Luton or something.

Far better to concentrate on the actual exams and then off to explore the Middle East and it's pre 9/11 delights, courtesy of the cash a friend left me when she died. I applied during that year. They were confused when I matriculated because I'd somehow entered the UCAS code for being Afro Caribbean.

I miss the little flat in Rome I had for a few months on the way back, near Termini station, overlooking a back courtyard, just across from a very noisy domestic violence household. I spent the first night there in tears, exhausted and sleepless. Then I loved it completely and have never stopped.