Gift Certificates

I'm not a big gifty person in general and gift certificates in particular are a little weird. On the one hand I get to get whatever I want, but on the other hand it feels even more impersonal. At any rate, I got a gift card to a book store and decided to buy some things not so much that I wanted but that I thought I might have gotten as gifts. Things people might think I want! Normally this wouldn't be very relevant here but some of it is at least tangentially gaming related and I wanted my mother to see what I got. Might as well put it here!

First up I actually wanted to get the next book in a series of mystery books I've been reading. I have the first 12 and figured someone might know that (they're on my bookshelf) and pick out #13. Well, it turned out they had books 1-12 along with 14, 15, and 16 of the series but no #13. Oh well. I wandered around the mystery section a bit and saw a book with dice on it. It was from a series but it looks like the books are all unrelated so who knows!

Then I headed over to the gaming section. I lent out my Backgammon for Blood book or lost it and can't find it and wanted to look for a replacement. Turns out they didn't have any backgammon books that I could find. But they did have a little book of celtic enigmas. 117 pages of puzzles and brain twisters attributed to celts? That sounds like something I might like!

I wandered a bit more and saw a big display with a board game marked 75% off. Probably terrible, but I gave it a look. Turned out it was a game based on a book series. The game didn't look very good but the premise sounded interesting. So I picked up the first book in the series and figure I can always go back and get the other two and the board game too if it ends up great. (The Hunger Games is the book. It's published by Scholastic so it may be a kids book, but we'll see.)

I was turning to leave when the ultimate book caught my eye. The second I saw it I knew my mother would have bought it if she'd seen it. "The World's Greatest Treasure Hunt. Quest for the Golden Eagle. A $1 Million Treasure is hidden SOMEWHERE in the world. All you have to do is FIND IT." I had Treasure Quest as a video game when I was in high school which purported to be a treasure hunt with a million dollar prize. According to Wikipedia there was some controversy over awarding that prize but I never came close. I was a failure at hunting for treasure in a video game. But maybe in book form I can pull it off? As an added bonus the book's writer is donating a lot of the proceeds from the books to breast cancer research, so it's win win. As I understand the book is a year old so it's either super hard or already solved and I'll have to do some searching on the topic to see but it should be interesting to say the least. I can remember reading a treasure hunt book my parent's had which had to do with cat puppets and tracing lines through their eyes or something. It was fun reading that despite the fact it had been solved years earlier.

At any rate, if it turns out the hunt is still on then I may try to harass other people into joining in on the hunt. If I can't find the Golden Eagle myself then maybe someone can help!