The winner of tonight's Jeopardy! episode used her contestant interview segment to talk about her love of board games and the apparent boom in board games that we are in the midst of right now. Who knew? But then I realized that I know quite a lot about board games, and have indulged in them as a guilty pleasure since I was a kid...from the ubiquitous game chess to the Game of Life, Monopoly, Chutes and Ladders, Sorry, Battleship, Stratego... and those are just the famous ones! There are more trendy ones that have grown in popularity in my circles like Settlers of Cataan and Ticket to Ride. The problem, of course, is that in order to play these games, you have to have OTHER PEOPLE to play with, and that's always been an issue for me, this recruiting of other people who are cooler than me and have their own ideas of fun (a real missed opportunity that the American standard of having fun is to just go out, get wasted, talk about nonsense, play beer pong, and forget). I don't want to forget, I want to PLAY board games).
There are in fact, many board gamer out there, who live in their own circle of board gamers, and I was briefly within that circle (that title reminds me of the book "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" by Ocean Vuong), during law school, my APALSA tutor initiated me into that circle of board gamers playing foreign-sounding games like "Carcassone," "Dominion," and "Alhambra." I actually learned a lot from those board games, like where Alhambra actually is (in Spain, Granada, Andalusia), some names of old currency like doubloons, but more importantly, I had a great time learning the games, how they work, and what the best strategies are. It's kind of why I play fantasy baseball and obsess over it: I want to perfect my strategies, implement and execute, then see if the pay off. Adult board games allow you to do that and have the perfect bend of theme, playable characters, and interactions with other players. While within that circle of board gamers I heard about an exclusive club called "The Gathering of Friends" which allowed enthusiasts to meet every year at a convention, much like Comic Con or AnimeCon; I believe I would have thrived at one of those events, and always yearned to go back to that life of entering board game fantasy worlds each board game is its own world of city building, sushi ingredient mixing, firework finale composing, and for anywhere from 5 minutes to multiple hours of game play I'd be enthralled, engrossed, infatuated by those games.
Some of the best in memory: 1.) Bang, a game set in the Wild Wild West where players select various Wild West characters to play under such as Kit Carson, Wild Bill Hickock, Calamity Jane, Pat Garrett, and use various guns to do shootouts. Very entertaining and educational about famous Wild West characters. 2.) Pandemic, a game I played before the real pandemic but had all the same principles, where the CDC had to stop infections in various cities before they got out of hand and spread to other cities. My takeaway: there are a lot of infectious diseases in the world, and they can spread VERY fast, overwhelming even the best efforts of epidemiologists. 3.) Ticket to Ride: Actually the last board game that MJ and I played (MJ is a serious person who doesn't dabble much in things as trivial as board games), it's good for geography, but one of the simpler games of "collect the cards" that doesn't require much strategy: feels like the ultimate road trip.
Alas, playing board games doesn't pay the bills, and besides pursuing my career and family, I got into other hobbies like dodgeball and trivia, but one day, one day....I'll come back to board games. Meanwhile, board games are very much fair game in the trivia world! Chinese checkers wasn't invented in China, it has a German origin; backgammon is often used as a trivia clue where the object of the game is to "cast off" (remove) all of one's pieces; just wait for the next board game category on Jeopardy!
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