A story I found.

I found this story on reddit, written by HobbitFoot. With his permission I am posting it here for others to read. You can find the original article here. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

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A lot of modern games have terribly written rules, even games that are made for children. They usually rely on someone who knows how to play the game and a set of rules provided to clarify small issues.
Case in point, when I went to high school, I saw a group of developmentally challenged kids huddled around a pair of twins trying to play a game of Pokemon: The Card Game one morning. I say trying because what they were playing obviously wasn’t how to play the game. I knew how to play the game, and I had time to kill so I started to teach them. They seemed to pick up some of the basics of it.

My group of friends, all in AP classes, were getting into Pokemon as a small break from Magic: the Gathering. So, one day, those kids saw us playing and started hanging around. They would watch us play, get help from us to play each other, and even played us. We all knew that they were taking classes to go work at the local supermarket and would say some odd things, but they weren’t crazy and it wasn’t like we were winning any popularity awards ourselves.

Eventually, we switched back to Magic; Pokemon was too simple and didn’t mesh well with the large multiplayer games we would have at lunch. The twins saw us play Magic, and wanted to learn. We would teach them, starting with the basics. Soon, they were playing games with our decks with us correcting them if they made any mistakes. They got better, and soon wanted their own cards. I sold the two of them some simple decks with mainly commons in it for a couple of bucks each; one was a blue deck and one was a red deck.

The lunch games I had with my friends were great. Some people would die, but the games rarely finished; we didn’t care. However, one day, I was just getting pounded on. I was down to four life. Then, it was one of the twin’s turns. He had the red deck; he had a Lava Axe; he dealt five damage to me. I tried to convince him to keep me alive, but he didn’t want that. He wanted the victory, and my friends backed him up saying the win was fair and square.

He beat me.

This was a guy who was literally near the bottom end of intelligence at the school; he was segregated out to take specialty classes because he couldn’t handle normal ones. I was one of the school’s brightest, acing the AP classes I was taking without breaking a sweat and earning academic awards from the school and from outside events.

He beat me at my own game.

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