Game Night

When I was growing up, one of my favorite TV shows was The Carol Burnett Show; I especially liked the sketches where Vicki Lawrence portrayed the obnoxious matriarch of an equally obnoxious family. (Yes, I know that they eventually developed those sketches into a truly dreadful sitcom–Mama’s Family–but, in it’s purest form, it was pretty funny.)

One of the running jokes on the sketches was the argument the family would always have whenever they played Monopoly, with the tag line being, “Can you buy houses when it’s not your turn?” I was thinking of that line the other day when I was playing Monopoly with my own family, and I realized that if we could be said to have our own tag line, it would be this: “How much rent do I owe if there are three pieces of lint and a button on Baltic?” Of course, in our family, tag lines aren’t just limited to Monopoly. There’s also the Sorry version: “Is the champagne cork part of the red team, or the yellow?”; and The Game of Life one: “If all of the broken toothpicks fall out of your car, does that mean that everybody just died and you have to start over?”

Every board game we own contains approximately 0% of the original pieces. Wait, I take that back: they each still contain the actual board. Other than that, we might as well be playing with cavemen. (Yes, I know that you can get replacement parts for games, but really: if I was the type of person who was organized enough to do that, I wouldn’t have lost the pieces in the first place.)

The worst part of it is that, as much as I’d like to blame this whole situation on my dreadful children, the truth is that it’s probably all my fault; after all, the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. (Unless, of course, you’re playing that “Hi-Ho-the-Cherry-O” game, in which case the little tiny piece of fruit will roll as far away from the tree as possible, most likely to come to rest under the couch).

No, I know that this particular problem is my own personal comeuppance. While my memory might be fuzzy on some things, I have very clear memories of the way I treated our games when I was a child: chewing up the Monopoly money and spitting it at my sister when I landed on Park Place (“What? I paid the rent–if you don’t want to pick it up, that’s your problem.”); covering over the rooms on the Clue board in order to turn it into a Mystery Date/Clue hybrid (“I’m going to guess in the helicopter, with Jan Michael Vincent?” “Nope–it was Ernest Borgnine.” “Ugh!”); and stealing all of the Sorry pieces to use as Oscar statuettes for our Barbie Academy awards ceremony.

Still, knowing it’s my fault doesn’t mean I don’t wish we could play a game of Scrabble without having to rely on a knowledge of Welsh (or other consonant heavy languages).

Of course, at least with board games there is the advantage that, even when the game is in a less than pristine state, you can still play it. You can’t say that about a lot of the more modern games–there is no lintball/broken toothpick fix for a Wii. (Or, if there is, I’m not clever enough to know it.)

Over the years I’ve heard a lot about how great video games are at developing hand/eye coordination. Board games, however (at least the way they’re played in my house), develop resourcefulness, which, in the long run, is a much handier skill. After all, what’s the point of being able to make the kill if some guy with a handful of toothpicks and a ball of lint is just going to be able to trick you out of it?

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