Christmas in Indy, Day 3: Christmas Eve, Game Night, and Putting the Chinese and American in Chinese American

December 24, 2025

Christmas Eve! We all ended up staying in, and more or less turning the evening into dinner and game night.

I should mention: my mom brought over a lot of food, and was also helping show Jasmine and Nathaniel how to prepare a few dishes (moo shu being the main one).

While we had some home made Chinese food, we also decided to supplement by ordering out for Chinese food. Given that this was also Christmas Eve… it felt like there was so much America happening, it was difficult to fully unpack it all.

Soon after our meal, we fell to games – again, a mixture between Chinese and America as well.

My dad, giving another tutorial on Mahjong.

A new game that I was excited to try out: Tiny Laser Heist.

The rules seem more complicated than they are. After going through it once, the whole process becomes a bit clearer.

Each person gets a handful of cards, and everyone takes turn being the criminal “mastermind.” Each mastermind then recruits players to join their team, with people using the cards in their hand to convince the mastermind they can help with the heist.

The goal is to steal a jewel from the museum. To do so, you need to move the locks off the top of a jewel, relocating them onto other locks… and to move the jewel onto a pedestal in the middle of the board.

The catch: each player gets to use just one tiny hand. The crew gets 90 seconds to complete the task, without bumping any of the lasers.

And for those who are not on the team? Those players can play “Mischief” cards, where they will be rewarded if the heist fails.

Full rules are here.

Shane and Nathaniel, who ended up being the most successful crew of the night.

Liz and Jasmine, working on stealing a jewel. Note that Liz is working with one eye blocked by a card – the result of someone else playing a “Mischief” card.