A Family of Four

42-year old Andrea Wright opened the cabinet and took out the board game that she had placed there weeks ago. She then took it to the living room. "Look, I know you were all looking forward to the family picnic, but our time together shouldn't have to be a total waste," she said.

This was the weekend when Susan, her 20-year old daughter, was back home from college. They were planning on having a family picnic. It was going to be the first time when all four of them (Andrea, her 44-year old husband Daniel, Susan, and her 18-year old son Brian) had been together, since Andrea came home for Christmas a few months before. She probably wouldn't be back until the summer.

But their picnic plans were dashed when the day they picked for the outing ended up being a rain day.

"What's that?" Brian asked his mom.

"A board game. I picked it up at a flea market a few weeks ago. I haven't had a chance to play it until now, though. It says you have to have four players. And since there are four of us, I thought maybe we could try it out."

Her family shrugged their shoulders, then sat around the dining room table. Andrea opened the box, then laid out the board, the dice (ebony in color), and the player pieces, which looked like Hershey-Kiss-shaped objects, in different colors - red, blue, yellow, and green.

The Wright family looked at the board, but didn't seem to find anything special about it. It looked like a basic game, with the object being the first one to make it to the end. There weren't even any cards, but there was an odd-looking flat glassy black stone in the center of the board. They wondered what that was for.

"Do we really have to do this, Mom?" Brian asked. "It looks so boring." Frankly, if he had to stay indoors today, he'd rather do something more fun, like play video games, or maybe watch a DVD movie.

"Brian, this is family time and we're doing it, okay?" Andrea said.

"Listen to your mother," Daniel said. Though, he really didn't want to do this either. Frankly, he'd rather be checking out a game, any game really, on one of the several ESPN channels they got. But he knew how much his wife had been looking forward to spending time with Susan, and he wanted to make sure that they were able to do something with their daughter before she had to go back to college.

"So, who wants to go first?" Andrea asked, looking around the table.

They had no idea what they were getting themselves into. Not only was this board game magic, it would also inevitably change them in some way, physically, mentally, or both.