We have a little game that we play at our house. I think that it is probably a fairly common game, as I have played the Work Edition with my coworkers on the rare days that we are working at school without any students and are allowed to leave campus for lunch. The name of the game is “Where Do You Want To Eat?®” The objective is the same, no matter where you play. You want to determine where your group (be it family or coworkers) is going to eat lunch/dinner. The Work Edition of the game is slightly trickier, because you don’t know the other player’s tastes as well, and an added complication is that you don’t know their financial means that well either. But the rules are basically the same. In Round One, the players stand around in a group and say “Where do YOU want to go for lunch?” The correct response to this is, “I don’t really care, where do YOU want to go?” To play this correctly, each person in the group must be asked the same question and must respond with the same answer (see above for correct question and response). Once the question and its response has completed this cycle, Round Two begins. Someone says, “Well, we could go to XXXX”, then pauses, “or YYYY”. The correct response to this statement is “Yeah, either one is good for me”. Notice that still no decision has been made. Round Two is completed when this cycle of statements has made it around the group. (Note: Round Three is where the Home Edition differs from the Work Edition.) In the Work Edition, Round Three goes like this… One person says, “Where is everybody else going?” another says “I’m not sure, let’s find out.” Everyone stands around while one player tries to find out from another group where they are going. Unfortunately, they are also playing the game, so they are absolutely no help whatsoever. Finally, in Work Edition Round Four, one person in the group has the courage to speak up and say “OK, lets go to XXX” Now, this takes a great deal of courage (or maybe that person is just starving and doesn’t want to waste the little time they have to eat standing around in a group deciding where to go). The reason that being the one to select the place to eat requires great courage is because if the food/service/ cost/distance from work/ temperature in the restaurant/anything else is not satisfactory, that person will feel as though he/she has personally failed their group. That person will NEVER again suggest any place to go, as they are forever marked as an unsatisfactory eatery selector. In the Work Edition, we also have a Bonus Round, (played at the end of the meal) which involves everyone looking at their watches until one person says, “It’s time to get back to work, or we’ll be late.”, thereby causing the moans and groans of everyone in the group. Another successful game of "“Where Do You Want To Eat?®” Work Edition has reached its conclusion.

Now, back to the Home Edition. As I said, the Home and Work editions of the game start the same, but often, in the Home Edition, instead of standing in a group, you actually play in the car. And since we don’t have another group to ask, the Home Edition skips right to Round Four, the round in which someone actually selects the place to eat. However, in our family, we have worked out a plan, in which each player names one or two places, then the other player(s) (sometimes there are just two of us playing) say either, “That would be ok,” or “No, I don’t feel like that”. Note that this does not actually cause a place to be selected, it merely eliminates several choices. At this point, we go into the Lightning Round, where a decision has to be made, so the driver (me) will not just be driving around town aimlessly. Sometimes we simply say, “It’s your turn to pick”, and we force one person to make a selection. The fly in the ointment with this strategy is that all players still retain the power to veto any choice. It gets terribly complicated at times. We have thought about making a spinner, with all of the restaurants that we frequent, so that we can just spin and make the decision easier. But wouldn’t that take away all of the fun and excitement of playing “Where Do You Want To Eat?®”?