Bing!

My husband loves thinking up games. He loves making up rules, assigning points and obviously loves it when he wins his own games. Last year, we made a game out of the Oscars. We had to predict the winner of every category and got a point for every correct prediction. The winner was obviously the one with the higher score. I am proud to say I won that one. This year it ended with a tie.

There is another game that we have been playing for more than a year now. We call it the Bing Wallpaper Prediction Game. Before you read any further, please visit http://www.bing.com/. You will most probably see a beautiful image. Sometimes it is the image of an animal but more often than not it is that of a place. Bing changes this image on a daily basis. Every day we have to guess which country the image on the site is from. The person who reaches 5 points first is the winner of that round. Then we start from 0 again.

A few weeks after we started playing, he got bored and decided that the game needed some more complexity. After multiple such tweaks and improvements, the rules of the game are something like this.

-          We get 3 guesses each everyday

o    If either of our 1^st two guesses is correct, we get 1 point.

o    If our 3^rd guess is correct, we get something known as a backlog. 2 such backlogs equal to 1 point.

o    Since, the US is frequently featured in these images, we get only ½ a point if we guess US and it is correct. We need to guess the state right if we want an entire point.

o    If both of us get it right, we each get only ½ a point.

I have to admit that I lost the first several rounds. Thankfully, just when I was developing a serious inferiority complex, I started winning occasionally. I am proud to say that I recently won 3 rounds in a row!

A few weeks ago, he surprised me with this.

As you can see, he sure takes his fun seriouslyJ Thank you dear husband for making manoranjan a constant part of our lives!

Last weekend we mentioned the game to our friends S and S and they are now hooked as well. It’s the perfect game for competitive couples to play. Rubbing a win in your spouse’s face really is a lot of fun.