Grandson knows best

So Evan, my grandson, is teaching me how to play Pokemon using a deck of cards from one of his playmate friends, Jake, who left his cards at Evan's. Evan has his own deck. It's sorted, cataloged, and filed in a big binder. He knows all the values of his cards and of the cards in the deck he gives me to play with. Of course, I don't know how to play so I start reading the little instruction notes on the cards, only to learn that we aren't playing the game "that way"; we're playing the game the way Evan is going to tell me we play the game.

So there are "damage" points, that are used to take out an opponents cards based on their value. I forget what they term for the value is, but there's an official term for the value of each card. Anyway according to Evan we pick a card and use it's damage value to damage, or kill, an opponent's card(s). He tells me he doesn't use the word kill because that "sounds to violent". Ok, so we "eliminate or take out" an opponent's cards. Clear?

After I've lost a dozen of my cards, I finally manage to kill, uh "take out", one of Evan's high value cards, only to discover he has a card that allows him to "reverse" the action and through the eliminate back on me. So in an an instant he takes out my stalwart knight and I'm left on the down side of a slippery slope which I can see has me losing in a matter of minutes.

I begin to notice a pattern here. Pretty much all of my cars have values below 80, while Evan's seem to be over 100 and in a few cases up to 500. It seems that Jake's card deck isn't as high in value as Evan's partially because Jake only has about 1/5th the number of cards as Evan. It gets clear to me that Evan has pulled out his highest value cards to play against me (I'm a slow learner). When I'm down to my last 6 cards to Evan's 35 cards, I capitulate, uh, that's "give up" in Evan's language.

The whole battle takes about 30 minutes, and I go meekly into oblivion. As we're cleaning up the cards and refiling Evan's in his binder, he says to me in all seriousness, "Well geez pop pop. You really need to get much more intelligent about how to use your cards." Not only have I been humiliated by an 8 year old, now he's lecturing me on my intelligence! Such is the lot of grandfathers.