In this episode, they are at the Aya’s house, the girl who has befriended Miki to play a game of Incan Gold (or Diamant). However, Miki starts to have a strange feeling with Aya’s older sisters friend joins them and is aggressive about playing the game. It reminds Miki of one of the times as a child that she was bullied and with the help of her friends she stands up against the bullying in the game. The game itself is a push your luck sort of game, so in the end Miki’s nerves of steel end up with her getting more gems, but only after she’s stepped out of her comfort zone and, with her friends at her back, pushed her luck just a little bit further. It turns out, though, that the reason she remembered Aya’s older sisters friend was that, in the situation where she was being bullied, that person had been the one to scare away the bullies and rescue her.

I think that this episode, as compared to some of the others, did a bit better job creating a twist at the end and creating some development for Miki. In the previous two episodes, she’s mainly stayed the same but has been brought out of her shell a little bit. in this one, she had to push past something, not only in her past, but in her current personality where she would have normally folded to the pressure of the more aggressive player. While I’m not sure that this carried on extremely well into the next episode, it was a well done episode and created a better story than some of them.

Incan Gold or Diamant are a game about pushing your luck to get the most gems. However, if two of the same monster ever show up, those left in the temple don’t get to leave with anything. So you have to play the odds, because everyone who stays in gets a share of the treasure. You don’t want someone to get too far ahead early in the game because it’ll require you to push your luck more at the end of the game to try and catch up. The twist on that is that the gems are hidden, so you might have a general idea of what people have, but unless you’re really good at counting cards, you’re not going to know everything.

Looking at this episode, I think it teaches a couple of interesting things. The first being that people should watch their game personas and read the table. In the episode, the friend is loud and aggressive in how she plays and it makes Miki uncomfortable at the table because of things in her life outside of the game. So there needs to be some need to read the table and know how your group plays or how a group that you’re joining plays. I think we also get to see how board games and real life do often intersect for people. The easy example is of someone being bullied, but people can throw fits if they don’t get the what they wanted in a game because they always do in real life, or not believe that they are wrong because they have been told they aren’t wrong or that they are perfect in the real world. I feel like that’s been a common theme of the show as they do a good job of pairing the games with what’s going on in the rest of the episode. But I feel like that’s something that can be overlooked in actual gaming, especially by gamers, because I want to play a game all the time as escapism and just for the challenge, but for other people are game might be something new or something that has other memories attached to it.

Overall, I think that this episode does a better job of being more than just what was expected. I don’t think that it is amazing in terms of storytelling and plot, but there are some cool things. But I am still enjoying the concept of the show and as someone who loves board games, it’s fun to see it more in the culture and games that I haven’t played, because there are so many out there you can’t play them all.

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So, to some people, this concept might seem kind of absurd or obvious, but too often, there is a line drawn between liking Star Wars and liking sports. There are some who believe that if you like sports, you really can’t be a true fan or as much of a fan of Star Wars as they are, because they don’t waste their time with stupid sports. And some people on the other side of the equation believe that if you really like Star Wars but don’t like sports, that probably means that you are living in your parents basement and have no social life.

Neither of these are nice or accurate things to say about someone who likes Star Wars and not sports, or vice versa. There have been issues for a long time between those who are considered the “jocks” and the “nerds.” One side bullies the other physically, and the other side bullies the other mentally. Both of these things happen way too often, and too frequently, both sides fail to realize how similar they really are to the other. I’m fortunate that I know and enjoy both football and Star Wars quite well. I haven’t read a lot of the Star Wars books, but I want to read some of them, and I never played football in school, but it would have been cool if I had been able to. So I’m coming from a point where I can say with confidence that while I’m not a true expert, I’m a nerd who nerds out over sports as much as I do over Star Wars.

With the Super Bowl happening last weekend, it brought up a few things for me, and way too often, I saw my nerdy, non-sports-loving friends complaining about how much stuff there is around the Super Bowl, and how people expect them to care, and how noisy Super Bowl parties are. It also then made me think of when Star Wars: The Force Awakens came out a month and a half earlier, and what that was like as well. When the Super Bowl happens, there are advertisement telling you to stock up for Super Bowl Sunday, get that new TV, get your snacks ready, get your beer, and get ready to enjoy the game. This can be seen as annoying to people who don’t care about it. Why should I be bombarded with something I don’t care about? But before Star Wars: The Force Awakens came out, there was another massive advertising blitz — you could get soda cans with Star Wars figures on them, there were many advertisements for Star Wars products on television, and even your clementine oranges were being brought to you by BB-8.

So, then, leading up to the Super Bowl, people at work talk about who is going to win the game, what is going to happen in the game, and where they are going to be watching it. And in the weeks leading up to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, people at work talked about who Kylo Ren is, who Rey is, what the storyline might to be, theories about why Luke wasn’t in the trailer, and when and where they were going to be watching the movie.

Starting to see some similarities?

So now comes game day for the Super Bowl, and release weekend for the movie. People show up at your neighbor’s to watch the game, and you can hear them through the old apartment wall, even though you don’t care to be hearing it. And the weekend prior to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, you watch some of the original trilogy with your friends (and, if you are brave, the prequel trilogy), and your neighbors end up hearing the party you have.

Finally, the Super Bowl is done and you’ve seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens. What do you do now in either case? You talk to your coworkers about it. You try to be nice to anyone who might have had to DVR the game, but you’ll probably accidentally spoil it or they’ll have it spoiled online. You talk to those who have seen The Force Awakens about all of the surprises, and you tell those who haven’t gone yet that they should see it, without accidentally spoiling it, even though it’ll probably be spoiled for them online.

But you really don’t like sports, and you don’t want to hear anything about it — what do you do? Do you complain to your friends about how annoying it is? Do you say how stupid it is that people watch grown men play a game (even though you know you’ve watched TableTop)? Do you post comments on Facebook and Twitter saying “Oh, is there something big happening in sportsball today?”

The answer to all of those questions is no, you don’t. Because you know how annoying it is when people call Star Wars dumb; you know how annoying it is to have something that you like labelled in a derogatory way; you know that you watch things on TV and online that other people don’t care about as well. You let other people be nerds in their own way; you let them play their fantasy sports while you read your fantasy novels. If they talk to you about it, you listen politely like you’d want them to do if you talked to them about your favorite fantasy novel. You let them geek out over the game like you geeked out over Star Wars: The Force Awakens. You do that because you want the same respect when you geek out over what you care about.

But maybe they don’t listen, or they change the subject when you bring up something nerdy. Maybe they use negative terms towards something you love. Maybe they seem annoyed when they can hear your movie marathon. So it’s okay to just poke a little fun at them, at least to your friends, or maybe put something up on Facebook about it, right? Most of your friends really don’t like sports anyway.

NO!

Don’t be a bully. Don’t cut down what other people like, and if someone cuts down something you like, just walk away and don’t complain. Why? Because that’s how mature, smart people handle situations like that. You lead by example instead of being passive aggressive about it; you don’t make fun of people behind their backs, and you don’t post derogatory terms in your Facebook posts.

We are nerds! We are supposed to be smart, and now that we are starting to get our culture much more widely accepted, let’s not undo that work by showing how not-smart and petty we can be. I’ve borrowed this line from The RPG Academy before about role playing games, but it is very true about everything nerdy: “If you’re having fun, you’re doing it right.” So let the people who love Star Wars have fun and do it right for themselves, and let the people who love the Super Bowl or other sports have fun and do it right for themselves, too.

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