That was Parade’s thought on Saturday afternoon after he’d spent an hour-and-a-half playing the Pokemon card game with his mum and his young nephew.

(Parade knows the digital version of Pokemon is the current craze, but card-playing runs in the family, so it was always going to be the more popular alternative.)

The rules could be a bit hard to follow, and Parade wasn’t familiar with the characters, so that made it hard to strategise, and there was nothing up for grabs at the end except bragging rights.

But Parade was amazed at how quickly the game got very serious.

After an initial softening-up period, the game swiftly became a strange mix of shifting allegiances, empty promises, betrayals and whispered asides, as each player used every method at their disposal to try to dominate the others.

“You know what you have to do,” Parade’s nephew told Parade at one stage, his eyes shining as if he was the spooky child in a horror film. “You have to team up with me to fight Nan. I don’t even need to tell you what you have to do because you know what you have to do.”

And then two plays later, Parade’s nephew changed tack and formed an allegiance against Parade with barely a bashful look.

It was all very Machiavellian – but heaps of fun.

JUST as fun, for a bit of a nerd like Parade, was watching the ACT election coverage on the ABC on Saturday night.

Parade has written in this spot before how much he enjoys an election from another state or territory for the opportunity to spend an evening in that area without having to leave the couch.

Parade managed to peek into all the corners of the ACT during the course of the coverage, and got a dummies’ guide to the big issues – principally the light rail line - and the controversies in that part of Australia. 

Parade’s already marked the Western Australia election in March next year into the diary.