Are board games making a comeback?
Or have they ever really gone away?
My daughter Pauline and her family enjoy board games, but there are eight of them — Mom, Dad and six children from 9 to 18 — and it’s difficult to squeeze that many people in around the Xbox to play video games.
One of their favorites is one we bought them for Christmas a few years back. In fact, they enjoy it so much that they have bought most of the add-ons to expand the game. I’ve never played it, but it sounds like a lot of fun.
They have quite a few others, including a couple that we bought for them, but the only ones that come to mind are two I thought they would like but they didn’t.
221B Baker Street is — obviously — a Sherlock Holmes detective game that I first played in the 1970s. It’s sort of a more intellectual version of Clue, and my first wife and I played it in 1977 during our two years in Austria. Both Leslie and I thought it was as good a game as we ever had played, and in those pre-Internet days, it was a lot more difficult to find things.
In fact, I think it was 25-30 years later == long after both Austria and the marriage — that I came across it. I bought a copy for myself that has never been out of the box. You really need more than two people to play the game well. I bought another copy for Pauline and her family in 2018. They tried it and didn’t really enjoy it all that much.
Oh well.
Actually, the game I have played the most was Risk, dating all the way back to my mid teens. Risk provided one of those funny moments for my friend Bill Madden and me in 1973. We went to the house of someone we knew, his name was Munzell, an interesting first name I have never come across in half a century since. We played Risk with him only to learn that he had all sorts of bizarre “house” rules.
That was where we coined a phrase we used for numerous people.
“I like Munzell, but …”
… followed by something we didn’t like about him. Eventually we realized we really didn’t like him at all, which led to the realization that if you start by saying you like someone but …, you really don’t like them.
At any rate, it has been many years since I have played the board games of my youth — Risk, Clue, Monopoly, Uncle Wiggily …
Uncle Whoggily?
Think Candyland or Chutes and Ladders — Snakes and Ladders for my friends in the UK — from the early 20th Century.
In fact, I don’t really play board games at all anymore, and there’s a new one coming out that totally makes my personal no-fly list. It’s a game for the mentally and morally deficient, also known as Trumpanzees.
Imagine a game like celebrates the insurrection of January 6th, 2021. “Storm the Capitol” is about Trump’s minions battling to take over the Capitol and preventing Congress from stealing the election from their favorite president. You can tell by the red tee shirt on the Klan Mom lookalike who that president isn’t.
Not only won’t I play that game, I won’t add it to my daughter’s collection.
She and her family are too smart to be Trumpanzees or insurrectionists.
Thank the Lord.