Farkle Friday!
So I love Fridays. And not just for the obvious reasons.
I love Fridays because I managed to convince a group of my eighth grade students, who eat in my room regularly, to put down their phones one lunch a week and appease my love of games.
I taught them to play Farkle.
Farkle?
Yes Farkle. The irresistible game of probability and chance. It involves six dice and a score keeper. My lunch bunch was a quick study. There are the "regulars" who play every Friday, and we sometimes have guest players who join us just for a round or two.
Here's what you might see if you walked into my room during lunch on any given Friday:
Three to six students sitting in a circle on the floor with me.
Someone would be rolling the dice and Victoria would be egging on that player to roll again in hopes that they would Farkle. A Farkle is when a roll of the dice yields no scoring combination of numbers.
Today, however, was Jilly's day. Victoria's razzing fell on deaf ears. Jilly rolled a rare three pairs for 1500 points, which put her well on her way to the 10,000 needed to be crowned Farkle champion. Jilly didn't stop there. This happened two turns in a row.
Now, had I had the good fortune to roll three pairs, I would have picked up all six dice and continued to roll pushing my luck and tempting fate, but not Jilly. She quietly slid the dice over to Lillie adding the 1500 points to her already large lead. Jilly's learned the value of playing it safe.
Occasionally, you might see me hitting the floor with fist clenched and looking up to the ceiling in mock anguish, crying out, "Farkle Friday" as my points vanish right before my eyes.
It doesn't pay to be greedy.
What you will most definitely see is smiles. All around the circle. We cheer each other on, tease, goad, and generally have a really good time. We've developed our own code of score keeping...Victoria loves when I say that's four hundy (meaning four hundred).
I look forward to these Friday lunches more than these players know.
Even when I lose!
My father tore his ACL and MCL jumping down from a wagon after an apple orchard hayride when I was eight. He came home with more than fifty stitches, a crazy apparatus that slowly bent his knee all day long, and a new dice game...Farkle. The man in his shared hospital room taught it to him, and they played for two days, expanding the game to 4 players when their wives came to visit. It was the funniest sounding game I ever heard, and the only game we played as a family after that. Sorry, Yahtzee. And while it never comes close to simulating the real thing, I have the app on my phone. Thanks for the smile.
ReplyDeleteHaha Of course Victoria is egging others on in hopes of them rolling a Farkle.
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