You might think that I am a solitary sort of person and you would be right – now.

I used to love board games like Cluedo and Snakes and Ladders as well as card games like Go Fish and Old Maid when I was a kid. I’ve never been into Poker or Bridge though I used to play Pontoon (21) a little.

I’m old, I’m retired, I live with Julian who is either out painting or in our studio painting. The nest is empty. I no longer drive and I enjoy my own company.

My mornings are taken up with reading the more and more disturbing news, letting ‘Zoe’ know that I don’t have covid, and games! I subscribe to the NYT games which daily gives me the chance to have a go at Wordle, the Mini (a small crossword), Connections, and Spelling Bee. Later I pick up my Code Word magazine and work out which number is which letter of the alphabet, filling in the boxes until I have found all the words.

Wordle is a word game that I am so happy is available. Every day I start with the word adieu. Before June 27 last year I used any word I could think of that contained 2 or 3 vowels. On the 26th of June last year, I used the word CRANE and guess what happened….!

That will never happen again! (Adieu had already been the answer in the days before I played it).

Solitaire is a card game also known as patience. There are many ways of playing solitaire but my favourite is the straightforward one I have played for the last I-dont-know-how-many-years, on my iPad. It keeps all sorts of data for me – how many games I’ve played, how many I’ve won, how many minutes (hours, days) I’ve played, and it used to tell me how many of the games I’ve won were finished in under 2 minutes. I don’t think it does that any longer but I am a little slower nowadays so it doesn’t matter.

A few years ago I made a painting which was a lot of legs overlapping each other. I thought it would make a great picture on the back of playing cards and, for some reason, the game I play offered the opportunity to choose my own card back. Here it is:

Code Words is a puzzle which looks like a crossword but there are no clues. Each box has a number in it and the player is given one, two or three letters to start. So, say H is 13, D is 19 and O is 4. The puzzle will probably have one H, one D and one O already filled in, then the person who is doing the puzzle has to fill in the other H’s, D’s, and O’s before attempting to fill in any other square. When I first started doing these puzzles, I figured out that the E’s would be important because E is the most common letter used in English. My idea was to find out which number occurs most in the puzzle and then start as though that number is E. That usually works, but not always!

Anyway, I’m not going to give away all my strategies!

I have got better and better at these puzzles over the years I’ve been doing them but sometimes I get stuck and then I have to stop, put the puzzle down and wait for a while. Often, going back to one, I immediately see something I missed before and that sets me on my way.

So, those are the three games I play every day. I wonder if anyone else plays the same games or others I don’t know about…..?