After we experienced the real thing, our favorite childhood sandbox game became Flood! Usually this game was played with my older brother, El Dictator or ED, but sometimes my sister, the High Powered Executive or Hipee, joined the fun. Our parents disliked Flood! and often banned it for limited periods of time, but we still managed to sneak in a game or promised we would just have a limited Flood! rather than a Total Apocalyptic Deluge. See the problem our parents had with Flood! was not so much that we were playing it as much as the fact that the sandbox was right next to the house and if we got carried away water would run into the basement.
Flood! was a rather time consuming game. First we had to build a landscape with dams, canyons, mountains, roads, and a city out of sand. This could take hours. We populated our city with Matchbox cars. Once we had the entire sandbox fashioned into some heavily populated area, we turned on the water and slowly introduced the means of their devastation, the hose. ED, naturally, was in charge of the hose. I got to make up a story to go with the natural disaster and help various groups to escape in their Matchbox cars. Not everyone made it out alive.
After the water destroyed everything we faced our time of reckoning. We could stop, and thus complete a limited game of Flood! which would be pleasing to our parents and ensure that we could play a future game of Flood! much sooner. Or we could take the road of perdition and make Flood! into the huge natural disaster that we wanted it to be. This required running the water until the whole sandbox was flooded and water was running out into the yard. Matchbox car would be floating away or buried in the sand. Our mother would notice the water had been running for an awfully long time and she’d start yelling at us to, “turn off the water” and asking, “did we want to flood the basement?” and mentioning that we should, “just wait until your father got home.” Choices….choices….
It is with great trepidation that I admit we usually chose wrong. I blame ED.
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