The Nerdiest Game Ever

Today was a good day. In the morning we had crim. After that, I had my business law reading group with our very young, recently tenured and endowed, and very attractive Indian professor, who received his JD/MBA from my law school only seven years ago.

We talked a bit about junk bonds trading and the rise of Mike Milken, then, somehow, ended up discussing why law school graduates tend not to have as much passion and love for what they do as business school graduates. My theory is that law is a much more stratified and prestige-oriented profession than business, and the three years of law school is basically a brain-washing process that forces you to accept the values and gradations of the rest of the law community. This is why we are so obsessed with rankings -- which school is #1, which law firm is #1, which journal is more prestigious, which judge is a bigger "feeder judge", whose professors get cited more often, etc.

Someone else made the point that the type of people who are lawyers are more risk-averse and only chose law out of anxiety and fear but anything they really love. So of course most of they are not going to really love anything they really do in the profession, either.

Anyway, I know these things are hard to generalize and harder to resolve, but the conversation got me thinking nonetheless. I am pretty happy with law school so far. I hope it's not all downhill from here. I guess I have a responsibility to make sure that it's not.

After my reading group, I went to a game appointment with S, ABS, and another person from our section, JE, to play Twilight Emperium in the law school cafeteria. This game is extremely nerdy and VERY elaborate. We needed a very large table in order to accommodate all the game pieces, and the whole game took about 3.5 hours.

The game is straight out of the tradition of Lord of the Rings and Star Trek, and it's like an intergalectic version of Civilization, with players controlling planets and vying for domination... the rules are extremely complex and took me a while to master, so I won't bore you with them here. Even from the look of it, it was the nerdiest game ever, and as R (another person who occasionally played the game with us) would say, you can judge a game's nerdiness by how many new and invented words it requires you to say while playing it. And this game has a ton of invented words. Just as an example: I controlled the Nuula people. 'Nuff said.

S attacked the Nuulas in the middle of the game. Epic battle ensued. I fend him off (with some extremely lucky moves and dice rolling), but the resources that we wasted (war is so wasteful!) caused ABS to forge ahead and to win. JE came in second. I came in third. S, for his treacherousness, came in last. :D

After that, JE went home to read. ABS, S, and I decided to walk to a Vietnamese restaurant in the Square. We had a very relaxed dinner (perhaps too relaxed). After that, I took a little detour and went to ABS's apartment to see his cat Pandora, then finally went home circa 8 to begin my reading.