`Morgan, you want to know a secret?...You are a much stronger player than I was at your age'

Oh, the words I long to hear.

We went back to our recently-discovered house of fun, Fat Cat, intent on stepping up our fledgling backgammon game. A few minutes after seating ourselves in the warm womb of our booth, however, we realized we’d forgotten how to set up the pieces. And we were shaky on a few of the rules.

Actually, we might've played backgammon – we may have just been bouncing around little shards of marble, talking about each piece as if he were an animate object trying to race towards his “home.” Oh well.

After consulting a Blackberry, politely contradicting one another with our take on the rules, we settled on some fundamentals and set off to play.

Ah, how I love games. It was actually a little embarrassing explaining to the Roommates that instead of staying home to watch Gossip Girl or The Hills or whatever, we’d be wandering down to the W. Village again to seclude ourselves in a corner to talk ourselves through strategy. But it was so fun – once we started, we were soon getting excited talking about our rudimentary statistical analysis (probably -- no, definitely -- only half-correct) of the benefits of this or that move.

I won’t link to King of Kong again, though I still love the obsessive tendencies people have with their little games. Another great movie dealing with similar, if more intelligent-seeming, obsessions is “Searching for Bobby Fischer.” I don’t know why it’s always stuck out in my memory (perhaps the friend's name being Morgan played a role); maybe I was just interested in movies about smart little kids, considering I was 10 years old when I saw it. Such a great movie.