Timeline When You're Not Tipsy

This is Timeline, a game that the kiddos' grandmother gave them for Christmas:

Will and I have played several rounds of this game this week--it's fast-paced, which I like, and it's got a great combination of trivia and logic, both of which Will loves. Many of the cards are hard enough to stump anyone, and most of them are quite hard, but there are plenty of cards that even a kid Will's age could know (lots of ancient history stuff), and plenty that she could figure out by using the historical events that she DOES know. The game also gets harder as you go on and more dates are put on the timeline, so there's some good strategy involved. Don't know when the saxophone was invented? Better get it on the timeline early when the only other dates you've got to fit it into are the invention of writing and the invention of the smartcard!

This is the Inventions version (there are a few more versions of the Timeline game that I want to collect eventually). It involves drawing cards at random and ordering them into a single timeline, discarding your card and drawing again if you've placed it incorrectly:

Here are some of the cards that I drew.

Here's Will figuring out where to place one of her cards into the timeline.

Until Will recently re-discovered this game and wanted to play it over and over again, we'd most recently played it on Christmas Day, at my Aunt Pam's house after our big, delicious, decadent Christmas lunch. Will beat me soundly in every round on that day, and was very much surprised to discover that my game play was much improved since then. Why, I was actually winning! How can that be?

Hmmm, maybe it was the slush punch that I drank on Christmas morning? And then the wine with lunch? And then a little more slush punch?

The fact that I actually had a half-full wineglass in my other hand as I played her on that day probably didn't hurt.