In the realm of entertainment, the board game has fallen on some hard times in recent years. Kids today, it seems, would much rather stand in front of a television pretending to dance or play an instrument than push around small pieces of paper and plastic with no certain purpose. I will readily admit that I too have enjoyed my fictitious guitar career quite a bit. Yet I also can't help but feel somewhat nostalgic for the days of my youth, when games were games and families devoted entire closets to holding colorful, rectangular boxes of fun. Some of those great board games have a special place in my heart -- after all, we had to have something to pass the time before we started getting 24-hour Jamie Lynn Spears updates.
Many of us experienced our first immersion in board games with the classic Candy Land. No strategic maneuvers or complicated thinking were involved; the whole game consisted of picking colored cards from a deck and racing to the finish. One could hardly find a better game to give to young children, although I wonder if it may have contributed to our current obesity epidemic -- the molasses lake depicted was clearly above the recommended serving size, and the Peanut Butter Brittle Man probably contained trans fats.
Generally one would move on from Candy Land to the more nuanced Chutes and Ladders. Another variation on the race theme, here the player could be affected by chutes, representing immoral behavior, or abetted by ladders, representing good behavior. In large part the examples were straightforward: fix dog's leg, good; steal cookies, bad. I was always confused, however, by the example of the boy who ran too fast and ended up hurting himself -- the moral was ambiguous and seemed merely to encourage greater physical prowess. C&L would have made a good teaching tool in the academies of ancient Sparta.
The Game of Life is one that was popular among families with older children. The course of the game leads players through college, finding a job, marriage, having children and retirement. In true capitalist fashion, the winner was the person who wound up with the most money. Perhaps the best part of the game were the Life Tiles, which awarded extra money on the basis of fictitious accomplishments like curing cancer. Despite the absurdity of it all, they never failed to give me an ego boost. One also wishes that Henry VIII had played this game; maybe he would have realized that you get just as many points for having daughters as sons, and he wouldn't have had to divorce Catherine of Aragon.
In the game of Sorry!, players drew numbered cards in a race to get all their pieces around the track and into their home square. Of course, the Death Star-like weapon in this game was the Sorry! card, which let you bump anyone's piece all the way back to the start. Presumably, you were supposed to be "sorry" about this, but in practice we all just did it with reckless abandon. It's a good thing I never tried to play it with loved ones.
The granddaddy of them all was, of course, Monopoly. Becoming able to play Monopoly was a rite of passage for most of us in our youth, what with its money system fraught with calculations and the bargaining skills usually necessary for victory. Equally daunting was the fact that Monopoly took a really long time to play; I was absolutely floored the first time my father told me the game could take more than an hour. Nowadays an hour isn't even enough time for me to walk around the South Lawn construction, but back then it was an eternity. Tragically, I was often unable to perform the arithmetic necessary to determine whether I ought to pay $200 or 10 percent for income tax. This meant that I often got the short end of the stick in the game, though I was well prepared for my career in the College of Arts & Sciences.
The board game isn't dead by any means, but the days of such classics as these are gone for good. For better or for worse, we Americans want our entertainment in quick sound bites now. We've lost out on that element of the old games where one could sit down with a few relatives or friends and find out just what snakes they really were. If you see one of these games in the bargain bin, why not give it a try? Keep a relationship counselor close by, though. Maybe he could be the banker.
Matt's column runs biweekly Tuesdays. He can be reached at mwaring@cavalierdaily.com.
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